This is a really interesting perspective on CRT. I hope Freddie Sayers can persuade Malcolm Kyeyune to participate in an Unherd interview.
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
Very good.
I was struck by this:
widely unpopular turn toward centralisation and increased complexity at almost any cost. The benefits of that process will go to a smaller and smaller slice at the top end of American society … — while the costs will be borne by everyone else.
The trend toward hyper-regulation doesn’t lead to a safer society in the long term. It leads to a stagnant one, where innovation is stalled.
With a powerful bureaucrat class who create nothing worthwhile.
Never forget:
“Regulatory complexity is a subsidy from small business to big business”
Quite. The great bureaucracies – late Rome, the Ottomans and the last centuries of Imperial China – always ossify and collapse.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
What difference does it make to see CRT through a different lens. It is still a crock of ..it. The elite can ride the crest of the wave, can change states or change countries. This does not make them right or on the right side of history.
Simon Denis
2 years ago
Short answer to the headline: because of peer pressure? After all, if everyone is falling over themselves to go “woke”, then it takes guts to hold out. Add to this the increasing recourse to ostracism, job loss and legal harassment on the part of “wokeism’s” enforcers, and the picture is broadly complete. You might as well ask, “why did so many people revert to Catholicism / Protestantism when Mary / Elizabeth Tudor ascended the throne?” Or “why did so many Russians / Germans fall in with the totalitarian regime?”
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
Fantastic bit of cynical Irony in the article there.
The problem though, is if you make they kids woke to allow them to remain in a position to better exploit the underclasses, then what happens when the fad of racial self hate abates, and the generation still is conditioned to believe it?
I have to agree with this answer too.
It seems that the elite parents will have burdened their children with a doctrine that renders them unable to function in society, and particularly in higher education and then work. At the same time, being perpetually accused from infant years onwards of being exploiters or (if black elite) victims is likely to leave such children prone to long-term mental illness.
I posit that CRT will hobble the children of elite parents, both black-and-white, allowing children from lower classes who might manage to avoid being indoctrinated, able to leapfrog over them.
Wilfred Davis
2 years ago
Very interesting analysis of what is going on.
If Harvard is woke, and if wokery thus gets your children into Harvard, wokery will be what the parents will demand of the (expensive, exclusive) schools they are paying for this outcome.
However, it doesn’t explain why Harvard is woke in the first place, when (in theory only, of course) wokery should undermine the existence of (expensive, exclusive) Harvard, and the privileged position of the (high pay, high status) Harvard professors.
Not to mention that wokery is all about the ruthless extinction of the rational faculties that Harvard was founded to nurture.
Julian Farrows
2 years ago
American parents are gaining increasing awareness of CRT. The next step is require schools and colleges to publish their syllabi online, each containing a ‘universality’ statement rather than a ‘diversity’ one. Parents and students have a right to know what they are paying for in advance. I’m doing a doctorate degree and have been fortunate so far in that only one class has touched heavily upon CRT. At the heart of all its claims and pretensions, CRT is an ideology that tacitly approves of the idea of white genocide.
…Congratulations Julian, you’re the first person I’ve come across who’s been prepared to mention the white elephant in the room, in writing. Critical Theory, applied to race, is the purest form of racism imaginable.
If racism continues to manifest, through successive generations of white people (and only in white people), and it does so systemically, then, notwithstanding economic reparation of the non-white, and individual whites’ acknowledgement of this flaw, the final solution for eliminating systemic racism, can only be the elimination of white people.
Last edited 2 years ago by Bernard Hill
Andrea X
2 years ago
I have just finished reading the original article.
Yes, the author definitely needs the Freddie treatment as I did not understand it all (it is VERY long and with plenty of references to things I know nothing about). Still, the bits understood are very thought provoking and the idea that society gets more and more complex as time goes by, until it collapses, certainly resonated with me.
Jonathan Andrews
2 years ago
Are people really so calculating?
By the time your children are old enough for university, how many parents have the energy and guile to game the system like this?
Some people are, but ignorance and longer-than-average exposure to academic environments, which are anti-western bastions of the self-hating leftists enforcing “correct” thinking, are more significant reasons.
The few leftists I still talk with naively think of CRT as black history month on steroids – as if that would make a difference.
I don’t think the parents think in these terms, but the school may do.
Chris Scott
2 years ago
Many people who lived under Nazi, Fascist, Soviet, and all the other authoritarian regimes never actually believed in the doctrine that was being espoused. I think the way forward is to pay lip service to the ideology, wave the odd flag, attend meetings and the regular self-flagellation nights so it will look good on your CV, a little 1984-ish, I know, but for the ‘professional’ classes it’s the way forward. For the proles, well … Like all revolutions, it will come to be detested by following generations and I’m confident that they will take the appropriate action.
This is a really interesting perspective on CRT. I hope Freddie Sayers can persuade Malcolm Kyeyune to participate in an Unherd interview.
Very good.
I was struck by this:
The trend toward hyper-regulation doesn’t lead to a safer society in the long term. It leads to a stagnant one, where innovation is stalled.
With a powerful bureaucrat class who create nothing worthwhile.
Never forget:
“Regulatory complexity is a subsidy from small business to big business”
“Regulatory complexity is a subsidy from small business to big business”.
Certainly can be true. And regulatory complexity can even discourage entering a given line of business in the first place.
But hey, as you say, looking on the bright side it does make ‘work’ for the bureaucrats and regulators!
Don’t forget all the unproductive compliance staff that businesses are forced to hire because of increasing requirements.
All affordable – if you’re big enough.
All affordable, until it isn’t.
Quite. The great bureaucracies – late Rome, the Ottomans and the last centuries of Imperial China – always ossify and collapse.
What difference does it make to see CRT through a different lens. It is still a crock of ..it. The elite can ride the crest of the wave, can change states or change countries. This does not make them right or on the right side of history.
Short answer to the headline: because of peer pressure? After all, if everyone is falling over themselves to go “woke”, then it takes guts to hold out. Add to this the increasing recourse to ostracism, job loss and legal harassment on the part of “wokeism’s” enforcers, and the picture is broadly complete. You might as well ask, “why did so many people revert to Catholicism / Protestantism when Mary / Elizabeth Tudor ascended the throne?” Or “why did so many Russians / Germans fall in with the totalitarian regime?”
Fantastic bit of cynical Irony in the article there.
The problem though, is if you make they kids woke to allow them to remain in a position to better exploit the underclasses, then what happens when the fad of racial self hate abates, and the generation still is conditioned to believe it?
I have to agree with this answer too.
It seems that the elite parents will have burdened their children with a doctrine that renders them unable to function in society, and particularly in higher education and then work. At the same time, being perpetually accused from infant years onwards of being exploiters or (if black elite) victims is likely to leave such children prone to long-term mental illness.
I posit that CRT will hobble the children of elite parents, both black-and-white, allowing children from lower classes who might manage to avoid being indoctrinated, able to leapfrog over them.
Very interesting analysis of what is going on.
If Harvard is woke, and if wokery thus gets your children into Harvard, wokery will be what the parents will demand of the (expensive, exclusive) schools they are paying for this outcome.
However, it doesn’t explain why Harvard is woke in the first place, when (in theory only, of course) wokery should undermine the existence of (expensive, exclusive) Harvard, and the privileged position of the (high pay, high status) Harvard professors.
Not to mention that wokery is all about the ruthless extinction of the rational faculties that Harvard was founded to nurture.
American parents are gaining increasing awareness of CRT. The next step is require schools and colleges to publish their syllabi online, each containing a ‘universality’ statement rather than a ‘diversity’ one. Parents and students have a right to know what they are paying for in advance. I’m doing a doctorate degree and have been fortunate so far in that only one class has touched heavily upon CRT. At the heart of all its claims and pretensions, CRT is an ideology that tacitly approves of the idea of white genocide.
…Congratulations Julian, you’re the first person I’ve come across who’s been prepared to mention the white elephant in the room, in writing. Critical Theory, applied to race, is the purest form of racism imaginable.
If racism continues to manifest, through successive generations of white people (and only in white people), and it does so systemically, then, notwithstanding economic reparation of the non-white, and individual whites’ acknowledgement of this flaw, the final solution for eliminating systemic racism, can only be the elimination of white people.
I have just finished reading the original article.
Yes, the author definitely needs the Freddie treatment as I did not understand it all (it is VERY long and with plenty of references to things I know nothing about). Still, the bits understood are very thought provoking and the idea that society gets more and more complex as time goes by, until it collapses, certainly resonated with me.
Are people really so calculating?
By the time your children are old enough for university, how many parents have the energy and guile to game the system like this?
My God, those that do must have miserable lives.
Some people are, but ignorance and longer-than-average exposure to academic environments, which are anti-western bastions of the self-hating leftists enforcing “correct” thinking, are more significant reasons.
The few leftists I still talk with naively think of CRT as black history month on steroids – as if that would make a difference.
I don’t think the parents think in these terms, but the school may do.
Many people who lived under Nazi, Fascist, Soviet, and all the other authoritarian regimes never actually believed in the doctrine that was being espoused. I think the way forward is to pay lip service to the ideology, wave the odd flag, attend meetings and the regular self-flagellation nights so it will look good on your CV, a little 1984-ish, I know, but for the ‘professional’ classes it’s the way forward. For the proles, well … Like all revolutions, it will come to be detested by following generations and I’m confident that they will take the appropriate action.