Why Wokeness Is A Big Deal

A reader wants to know why I write so ofter about wokeness at Baylor University — as distinct, I take it, from other universities. There are a couple of answers to that question.

First, I used to live in Texas, and developed a number of friends and acquaintances at Baylor. I have a network there, even of people I never met, but who inevitably know someone I do. People leak things to me. Nobody is leaking things to me from other universities like they leak to me from Baylor.

More importantly, if they were, I would probably be less inclined to write about it. It’s not news when a public or private university embraces wokeness. It’s not even really news when a Catholic university does. It is news, however, when a big Baptist university deep in the heart of Texas does. This is particularly so when well within my own memory — in the first decade of this century — Baylor’s leadership at the time aspired for it to become a bastion of Christian orthodoxy in higher education. This was so attractive that some Catholic scholars told me back then that they preferred teaching there. Tom Hibbs, who moved to Baylor around 2003 to run the Honors College (and who recently became president of the University of Dallas), said at the time that he felt far more free to be an orthodox Catholic at Baptist Baylor than he did at his previous institution, the Catholic Boston College. I was a big public champion of Baylor’s vision and mission back then.

So it has been really striking — and dismaying — to watch the university transform itself so swiftly into an oasis of wokeness. I get the main reason why this happened: the Baylor football sexual assault scandal, which ran from 2011 to 2016, and cost the university president, Ken Starr, his job. It’s hard to make a plausible case for conservatism on campus when the conservative administration let that happen. Mind you, it’s not logical to blame “conservatism” for what happened, much less to claim that progressivism/wokeness is the cure. But that’s where we are. Anyway, I watch what’s happening to Baylor as a rare case (well, the only one I can think of) in which a Christian university that only the day before yesterday sought to establish and maintain a conservative-ish identity, now flipping overnight to embrace the opposite. This week, I spoke to a conservative white Evangelical, age 23, doing graduate work, and he told me it’s mind-boggling how many of the conservative white Evangelical professors at his undergraduate alma mater are now embracing Critical Race Theory, and seeing no conflict with their morals, politics, or philosophy. Something big is happening, and it’s happening all over.

I received the following letter last night from a reader, who gives me permission to publish it so long as I take his name off. He identifies himself as a lawyer and Baylor alumnus. It was a challenge to me, made honestly and graciously; I accept it. First, here’s what he wrote:

Today I read — with great interest — your piece, “‘Equity’ is Not ‘Equality’, Comrade.”   I received a link to the article from a Baylor professor with whom I share many laments about the school’s direction, albeit on different grounds from those expressed in your recent commentary.  If you don’t mind, I would like to share some thoughts and respectfully pose a challenge.

For all the fine points you make, I truly see a chasm between what you and your youngest readers see as obvious truth.  I am among the readers whose ears do not find terms such as “whiteness” to be jarring, but I nevertheless listen to your concerns without understanding the arguments for why such terms are so threatening and conjure imagery of tyranny and soviet socialism. Why must one lead to the other?

Many millennials, myself included, have spent a majority of our adult lives adjusting to academic settings and polarized political environments dominated by the terms and attitudes contained in Baylor training manual. I submit that the concepts it contains are hardly specialized.  Wokeness is no longer the exclusive domain of the progressive activist or the left-leaning Twitter mob. It actively thrives in everyday circles and even dominates the discussions of professionals, shaping the decisions of professional and public institutions. In that sense, I imagine that most working millennials who read your article experience the adoption of these new terms as other good or inconsequential. I am relatively conservative and worry about free speech much more than the prospect of my fellow citizens deciding to adopt socialism if they so choose.

Although you and I probably agree on a lot of things, I am not clear on how we get from a recognition of something like racial injustice and the desire to remedy it to the dystopia you seem to warn about.  At the risk of oversimplifying a task that would require some intellectual heavy lifting, I would propose a chart showing three things, each in their own vertical column: (1) a woke/progressive value; (2) why it is mistaken; and (3) how it directly leads to the consequences you believe it will have. Alternatively, a chart or narrative showing the logical steps from correct values, to erroneous values, to socialism.  Would you please consider making some of these connections for some of your readers?

For example, why is allyship problematic? An employee who objects to forced allyship should capitalize on the freedom they have in this country to seek employment elsewhere. It is a longstanding truth that you are not required to agree with what your government on everything it stands for, and those whose beliefs pose an irreconcilable conflict that keeps them from performing essential job duties or feel unwelcome should work elsewhere. I know many private businesses whose values align perfectly with such a conservative, Christian worldview and would gladly welcome such people among their ranks.  Christians such as you and I do not need to feel welcome, or even tolerated, everywhere.  So why does allyship, or even whiteness, portend such dire consequences? Is it simply because ideas with which conservatives disagree will soon have the force of law?

I have attached an example of a type of chart that could show how an argument might proceed, not that you need it from me.  I took the time to make it because I know you are a serious intellectual and I want to hear more of your arguments.

But respectfully, you might consider showing exactly how you arrive at your end point.  Your conclusions and predictions may very well be right, but I do not yet see it clearly.  To use the below attachment as an hypothetical example (not reflecting anything I’ve heard you argue), how do we proceed from step to step? Does the progressive takeover of educational institutions guarantee changes in that the voting majority will be progressive? Does a progressive worldview of the voting majority necessitate a progressive public policy, not to mention one that is upheld as constitutional?  Without recognizing the immense barriers progressive ideas would have to destroy in order to create the dystopia you suggest, potential consequences of perceived destructive ideological danger are purely speculative (however logical they may be).

I hope I do not presume to tell you your business, seriously misunderstand your column, or show myself a fool for not clearly seeing a cause-and-effect between progressive values and an American dystopia. Whatever progressive path Baylor or our country takes, I pray it evolves into an opportunity not for fear, but to discover truth, and allows good people who share our faith to act as witnesses to the love God has for all people.

Regardless, I look forward to enjoying your new book and will continue to read your columns.

Here’s the chart the reader made:



I appreciate the tone of the reader’s letter, and the chance to explain myself more clearly.

I’ll start by saying something that Millennial and Gen Z readers probably don’t appreciate, because it happened before their time. It is hard to overstate the degree to which people of my generation (I’m 53, Gen X) were saturated with Martin Luther King-style race liberalism growing up — the “not the color of your skin, but the content of your character” stuff. It was true, and received like gospel by many of us — even though, as fellow white Southerners can tell you, it caused conflict with older Southern relatives. We were told about the evil of segregation and Jim Crow, saw the injustice of it, and saw the solution to it as doing away with all structures and practices that treated people differently on the basis of skin color or ethnic origin.

This led a number of us — conservatives, anyway — to oppose affirmative action on the principle that you do not battle the effects of unjust discrimination by imposing unjust discrimination. This gets to a deeper principle that separates conservatives from liberals on these matters. Generally speaking, conservatives believe justice requires equality of opportunity; liberals believe it requires equality of outcome.

So, on the conservative view, if a city’s population were, say, 30 percent black, but the number of blacks on an office team made up only five percent, that fact alone would not be evidence of racism. It might be a sign of racism, if there were indications that people of color faced barriers to being hired in that firm, but it’s not dispositive.

But this is not at all what today’s antiracist ideology holds. As Coleman Hughes writes in his review of Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be Antiracist:

If the book has a core thesis, it is that this war admits of no neutral parties and no ceasefires. For Kendi, “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” only “racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” His Manichaean outlook extends to policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” Kendi proclaims, defining the former as racist policies and the latter as antiracist ones.

Every policy? That question was posed to Kendi by Vox cofounder Ezra Klein, who gave the hypothetical example of a capital-gains tax cut. Most of us think of the capital-gains tax, if we think about it at all, as a policy that is neutral as regards questions of race or racism. But given that blacks are underrepresented among stockowners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital-gains tax cut? “Yes,” Kendi answered, without hesitation. And in case you planned on escaping the charge of racism by remaining agnostic on the capital-gains tax, that won’t work either, because Kendi defines a racist as anyone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction.”

This is not only unjust and unrealistic, but completely unworkable as a policy to run a society or an institution. But “antiracism” has been embraced uncritically by many universities and other institutions. Baylor University, for example, is teaching antiracism to its undergraduates. It’s a good example, in fact, of how these radicals use language to conceal the radicalism of their claims.

What is the opposite of antiracist? Pro-racist? Racist? Nobody wants to be on the opposite side of antiracism. So if you are presented with the opportunity to endorse antiracism, unless you really understand what’s going on, you are likely to do so. Besides, who is going to be the brave Baylor freshman who stands up in the “cultural humility” class and dissents from the antiracism doctrine the instructor is proclaiming? Who is going to be the brave employee to out himself as a potential racist in the eyes of his company by saying he doesn’t buy this stuff?

My correspondent said he didn’t understand why this stuff made people like me think of totalitarianism. Here is a passage from my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, in which Pawel Skibinski, a Warsaw historian, talks about how totalitarians use language in a particular way to manipulate others:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases— — hierarchy, for example, or traditional family — with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

I would say to my correspondent: “Do you see how the very term ‘antiracism’ as it is used conditions and manipulates the discussion of racial conflict, racial discrimination, and how to discuss it? If you object to anything that the self-described antiracist educators propose, you open yourself up to accusations of being racist.”

Many of those same woke terms work in the same way. They frame the discussion in a way that leads to particular conclusions.

The reader brings up “whiteness,” another common term and concept in woke discourse. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the social construction of the concept of what it means to be white. For example, there was a time in this country when Italians were not thought to be white. How did that change? What does it mean? This is certainly fair to study, as is “white supremacy,” which historically refers to the apartheid-like social and legal system of the pre-Civil Rights South.

But social justice discourse uses the concept of “white” in a specific way. James Lindsay’s essential “Translations From The Wokish” dictionary explaining, in plain English, the meaning of social justice jargon, in this entry explains what these activists mean by things “white.”

I don’t want to get into the specifics here — spend some time on Lindsay’s dictionary, and you’ll learn a lot about the way we speak today — but I simply want to point out that the discourse the social justice/Critical Race Theory people use is a tool for redistributing power on the basis of identity, and manufacturing consent of those to be disempowered by manipulating the way they think and speak. If you are familiar with Marxist-Leninist terminology and discourse, you will be all too aware that that form of totalitarianism saw people not in terms of individuals, but in terms of group identity.

Which brings us to this passage from Live Not By Lies:

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship. The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

This, to answer my correspondent’s question, is what is wrong with “allyship.” What does it mean to declare yourself to be an “ally” of, say, a gay colleague? You wish to identify that you support him. Fine and good. I am an Orthodox Christian, but if I worked in an office, I would strive to support all my co-workers in our common project. But what if I believed that declaring that I was an “ally” violated my conscience, by coercing me to appear to endorse homosexuality itself? Is it not possible to be committed to supporting my gay co-worker, and treating him fairly, without publicly endorsing everything about him? In fact, anyone who declined to declare themselves to be an “ally” of someone for any reason — sexuality, race, whatever — would immediately be suspect.

Why won’t you sign? Are you a bigot? If you’re not a bigot, then why won’t you sign? And so forth. It’s a form of coercion, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with being a good co-worker or fellow student. Imagine that you are an office worker or student in the 1950s, as the Cold War was raging. Your office requires all workers to attend a course on “100 Percent Americanism,” and at the end, requests that everybody sign a Pledge of Loyalty to America, and wear an American flag lapel.

What if you love your country, but dissent from some of the claims in the 100 Percent Americanism program? Like, what if the program’s manifesto claimed that American democracy was a perfect form of government. That’s not true, you think; look at legal segregation, and how it treats black citizens. Besides, you think, what does any of this have to do with what we do at this factory: make widgets?

Or what if you simply resent being manipulated and coerced like this? So you don’t sign the Pledge, and you don’t war the flag pin on your lapel. Now you have to worry that all your co-workers will wonder if you are secretly a Communist. After all, if you loved America, why would you refuse the Pledge and the pin?

You see the point?

It was helpful to me that the Baylor alumnus wrote that

Wokeness is no longer the exclusive domain of the progressive activist or the left-leaning Twitter mob. It actively thrives in everyday circles and even dominates the discussions of professionals, shaping the decisions of professional and public institutions. In that sense, I imagine that most working millennials who read your article experience the adoption of these new terms as other good or inconsequential.

I have been saying for some time that what had been confined to campuses has become far more general. It is a very bad sign, though, that “most working millennials … experience the adoption of these new terms as [either] good or inconsequential.”

They are neither. That this comment came from an educated Millennial professional, making it in good faith, makes me hopeful that Live Not By Lies will be useful in combatting this ideology. From the book:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

See his point? Marxist discourse was confined to academics for a long time, until suddenly it wasn’t. Ordinary people found their lives controlled by concepts that had only decades earlier been confined to professorial journals and discussions. Similarly, now that wokeness has spread like wildfire through elites and their networks, we are going to have to deal with it, and the destruction it causes, for a very long time.

If it provided a truthful and accurate view of the way the world worked, that would be one thing. But it is an ideological system loaded with malicious assumptions, though, like Marxism, it aims to rectify injustice. Bo Winegard, an academic who was “cancelled” for his heretical opinions, quotes Kendi to make an important point here:

The NBA example is a good one. No one wants the NBA to “look like America.” So why aren’t the professional antiracists concerned about the NBA? Where is the moral consistency? If there’s no moral consistency, you might wonder if the wokeness/antiracist ideology is not really about “social justice” and “fixing the original sin of racism,” and is really about something else. More deeply, I invite my correspondent to consider that some of the problems of racial injustice cannot be fixed without destroying valuable liberties, and leaving everybody worse off. This was exactly the experience of peoples under Communism. As I wrote above, they began with a certain ideal of social justice, and ended up oppressing, impoverishing, imprisoning, and even exterminating millions in their quest to eliminate inequality. Good intentions and worthy goals to not grant moral absolution.

Going back to the reader’s letter, I should clarify that I don’t really worry about economic socialism. I don’t want to live under it, but that’s not my primary concern in my writing about wokeness and social justice. I’m far more interested in the way this ideology stands to affect free speech, freedom of association, religious liberty, and racial discrimination. One reason that I particularly grieve the way it is taking hold at Baylor, a Christian university, is because I believe it is a counterfeit of true social justice, as I explain in this passage from Live Not By Lies:

The term social justice has long been associated with Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity (the term was coined by a nineteenth-century Jesuit), though now it has been embraced by younger Evangelicals. In Catholic social teaching, “social justice” is the idea that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, so that all can live up to their dignity as creatures fashioned in God’s image. In the traditional view, social justice is about addressing structural barriers to fairness among groups in a given society. It is based in large part on Christ’s teachings about the importance of mercy and compassion to the poor and the outcast.

But Christian social justice is difficult to reconcile with secular ideals of social justice. One reason is that the former depends on the biblical concept of what a human being is—including the purpose for which all people were created. This presumes a transcendent moral order, proclaimed in Scripture and, depending on one’s confession, the authoritative teachings of the church. A just social order is one that makes it easier for people to be good.

Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a truly Christian social justice warrior. (Interestingly, Father Kolaković introduced Maurin’s writing to his Family in Bratislava.) Maurin distinguished Christian social justice from the godless Marxist view. For Marxists, social justice meant an equal distribution of society’s material goods. By contrast, Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice. Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby insightfully links sexual radicalism to the scientific roots of the Myth of Progress. He has written that “the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”

Without Christianity and its belief in the fallibility of human nature, secular progressives tend to rearrange their bigotries and call it righteousness. Christianity teaches that all men and women—not just the wealthy, the powerful, the straight, the white, and all other so-called oppressors—are sinners in need of the Redeemer. All men and women are called to confession and repentance. “Social justice” that projects unrighteousness solely onto particular groups is a perversion of Christian teaching. Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error. It is untrue, and therefore unjust.

Moreover, for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just. Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratifies sin and undermines the natural family. In a 1986 encyclical, Pope John Paul II denounced a “spirit of darkness” that deceitfully posits “God as an enemy of his own creature, and in the first place as an enemy of man, as a source of danger and threat to man.”

Christians cannot endorse any form of social justice that denies biblical teaching. That includes schemes that apply identity politics categories to the life of the church. For example, answering calls to “decolonize” the church means imposing identity politics categories onto theology and worship, turning the faith into radical leftism at prayer.

Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.

Any theory or scheme of social justice that holds out members of any group to be morally innocent or morally guilty by virtue of their membership in that group cannot be reconciled with Christianity. Period. Any social justice scheme that construes membership in a community solely in terms of power relations, absent factors like grace, mercy, solidarity, and sacrificial love, cannot be reconciled to Christianity.

So, to return before ending to the reader’s chart:

I contest the premises.

First, what do we mean by “disparate treatment, de facto or under law”? I don’t really disagree with this, but I think we should recognize that disparate treatment can be just under certain conditions. For example, the Supreme Court has rightly held that religious institutions, given their nature, have the right to hire only people who share a commitment to the ideals and practices of that institution. That is disparate treatment, but it’s a byproduct of laws guaranteeing religious liberty — an important principle of liberal democracy.

Second, I strongly disagree with the idea of “racial equity.” Nobody can deny that a history of disparate treatment has had material consequences for victims of these laws and practices. But this is a fact of complex human societies. The factors that lead to positive or negative outcomes for individuals are so vast and complicated that it is impossible to come up with a scheme to make outcomes more uniform.

Ibram Kendi believes that supporting a capital gains tax cut is racist because blacks are historically underrepresented among stockholders. Well, guess what: country people, both white and black, in south Louisiana are historically underrepresented among stockholders. So are Vietnamese immigrants. If a capital gains tax cut is immoral, it’s not because most black people, or Southern rural people, or Vietnamese immigrants, don’t own lots of stock. Kendi’s scheme is absurd.

Some people are born with natural advantages over others. Physically attractive people have a natural advantage when it comes to gaining film roles. Unusually tall people have a natural advantage when it comes to joining a professional basketball team.

Others are born to social advantage — their parents are wealthier than others, or better connected. But this is complicated stuff. Perhaps that social advantage comes from their parents’ way of life. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks about the chaotic life he had growing up poor and/or working class in Appalachia, and how that way of life conditioned him to fail at holding a job. If not for the US Marine Corps causing the seeds of discipline his grandmother planted within him to seed and ultimately bear fruit, he might not been able to finish college and become a success. Vance is white, but was born into a broken family without wealth, and to a mother who struggled with drug addiction. What does “whiteness” mean to him, and his success? Is the son of a wealthy black New Orleans lawyer disadvantaged by his blackness, and Vance, who grew up poor in Appalachia, advantaged by his whiteness?

It’s impossible to sort this stuff out. There are so many contingencies. Kamala Harris’s father was from Jamaica, as Barack Obama’s was from Kenya. Neither are the descendants of African slaves brought to America. How can they be considered disadvantaged for social justice purposes? Are they disadvantaged, while the successful children of my friends who immigrated from Ukraine two decades ago, arriving here speaking little English, with almost nothing in their pockets, considered advantaged, because of the color of their skin? When I lived in Dallas, I knew a young man whose skin was as white as mine. He was a Bosnian Muslim who came to America with his mom and dad as a little boy, a war refugee. They arrived penniless, and spoke not a word of English. He was a very hard worker, and a cheerful guy. He managed a restaurant when I knew him. I don’t know if he ever went to college, and in any case I imagine he must be nearly 40 today, but let’s say he ended up at Baylor today, a guy with his background. What does “whiteness” mean to him? How is he an oppressor of people of color — this Bosnian Muslim who arrived with nothing, not even a word of English?

Like I said, impossible to sort out. I believe that a just social order will provide for equality of opportunity, and maintain a structure that enables people who live fairly, with self-discipline, and work hard, to achieve reward for their efforts. I do not believe that guaranteeing certain outcomes for people on the basis of factors inherent to their identity (including, I should say, legacy admissions to elite colleges) is just.

So, to answer the question posed by my correspondent’s chart, Step 3 is wrong because it is based on a fatally flawed premise in Step 2. Put crudely, it requires robbing a man who came by what he has honestly to compensate a man who has less, perhaps through no fault of his own — but that doesn’t give him a right to the first man’s property.

What I strongly encourage people like my correspondent to do is to think very hard on the difference between equality and equity, and whether the loss of freedoms required to bring about a society that is equitable (not just in material terms) is worth it, or is even fair. And, I encourage y’all to meditate on the experience of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, and how badly the entire system ran because it allocated positions of responsibility not to those who knew how to do their jobs, but on the basis of ideology.

We will never create utopia on this earth. The best we can do is to tinker with the system to patch holes when we see them, and to find the best achievable balance between liberty and equality. This is not a heroic politics, but it is a livable one. What the people at Baylor, and everywhere that social justice ideology is proclaimed and instituted, are doing is creating more injustices, and communities riven by suspicion and resentment — and constant culture war. It is not only unjust, but it also does not work.

The fact that young Americans born and raised after the end of the Cold War have no idea what communism was, how it worked, and why it destroyed societies, is a grave error on the part of our educational institutions. I hope my little book Live Not By Lies helps to turn things around.

UPDATE: A reader responds:

Here is another way to respond that I think is worth considering: an analogy to Mark Regnerus’s Cheap Sex.

I’m assuming you have read the book (you have blogged on it right?) [Note: Yes, here. — RD] here so I’ll speak generally. Regnerus is showing how sex and the drive for sex is not just another desire among others, but rather it is a drive that is deeply rooted in us and which structures our society. It cannot simply be disentangled from our entire social order. We might have though sexual liberation would be an unqualified good–more sex and therefore more pleasure for everyone. But it didn’t work out that way. By messing with the natural order of sex, we have undermined society. And liberating sex has actually made is less pleasurable and we do less of it.

I think there is a critique of the Woke that is very similar only instead of sex for everyone, it is more like status/honor/power for everyone. But not status/honor/power the traditional way–earned via social contribution–but status/honor/power as being given. As though status/honor/power is this good that the state can divy up and distribute like money. Moreover, the status/honor/power is given according to a standard that represents an inversion of the value system that rewards competency: status/honor/power is achieved by victimhood status.

This is approaching Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. I think Nietzsche was criticizing a distortion of Christianity, but that is what wokeness is: a perverted interpretation of the “first shall be last”.

What are the social consequences of this inversion of values? Or “cheap status”? I think it will be ruinous in the same category that cheap sex has been and every bit as undermining of the social order.

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