The Spectator has published Penn Law Professor Amy Wax’s anatomy of the suppression of dissent in higher education under the ideology of wokeism and other superstitions of the age. Perhaps I should refer to her as “the heretical Amy Wax.” Surely this cannot stand:
Here I will focus on higher education, and one important aspect of its debasement: the growing practice of censoring and punishing free expression. Why has this happened? The story is complex and intricate, but I believe it can be boiled down to three interrelated developments that lead inexorably to the suppression of dissent.
They are, in brief: the adoption of a so-called woke ideology, and especially its demand for equity in all things and its aura of moral certainty; the adoption of a therapeutic imperative to psychologize, subjectivize and thus overextend and abuse the ideas of mental harm and trauma, along with the weaponized deployment of the legal concepts of harassment and hostile environment; and the widespread feminization of higher education as well as other aspects of our democracy and society. How do these trends inexorably lead to censorship? The first culprit, the rise of woke ideology, divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, identifies western and American cultures and institutions as bigoted and racist and sees disadvantaged minorities and non-westerners as victims of first-world oppression.
The disdain for Anglo-American practices extends to their support for free thought and expression, which are regarded as suspect tools of racist white and western hegemony and thus admits of no hesitation to suppress ideas and thoughts when they undermine woke objectives. In addition, and most importantly, wokeism considers all inequalities illegitimate and as products of bigotry, discrimination and other evil social forces that must be fought and vanquished.
But insisting on “equity” – which has come to mean strict equality of outcomes – and seeing existing inequalities as the product of racism and discrimination, requires suppressing facts and accepting falsehoods about the realities of the world around us. Empirical evidence abounds that not all people or groups are equal in every respect – in competence, capacity, actual and potential contributions and culture.
And there are also compelling reasons, based on empirical evidence, to deny that all observed inequalities are the product of bigotry, prejudice, racism and oppression. Yet the woke ideology cannot accept these possibilities and is actively hostile to them. Admitting or even considering the realities that belie the woke worldview jeopardizes its extravagant and ambitious project of social engineering, which aims to bring about equality by any means necessary.
The facts and arguments that undermine the woke project and the assumptions that maintain it must be suppressed, censored and punished. In order to succeed and maintain its grip, woke must become the enemy of free thought and expression. The adoption of “woke” ideology leads inexorably to censorship.
Much more here.
