In the aftermath of a revolution the symbols of the old regime are yanked down with unsentimental haste. The progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has — the news was reported on BBC Radio 4 — removed her “she/her” pronouns from her profile on X. Last week’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, the writer Kathleen Stock observes, went unmarked by most British institutions for the first time in years. Nothing from the BBC, the Labour Party or even Stonewall.
Not long ago the Bank of England was floodlit in commemorative pink, white and blue, and vigils were held at universities. This time, the most notable news from the trans rights battle was that Warner Bros has defended JK Rowling’s “right to express her personal views” — a position that would quite recently have counted as a declaration of corporate civil war for any organisation with young arts graduates on its staff.
I do not by any means believe that the “woke” movement is over. But it is remarkable how quickly passions fade. A sober “statistical analysis” in the Economist finds that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline”. Walking past the starkly unilluminated Bank of England or searching the BBC website in vain for news of one of the most important days in the trans activism calendar, you might be forgiven for wondering: how much was anyone really invested in this stuff in the first place?
I have, quite absurdly, been thinking and arguing about the excesses of political correctness for virtually my entire adult life (I date my induction into the culture war to the day I read an article in a university magazine arguing that people with good eyesight who wore lensless hipster glasses for fashion purposes were potentially engaging in “ableist” behaviour). Now, many of the people whose views I have spent my career puzzling over seem to be in the process of deciding that perhaps none of it really mattered that much after all.
Those of us who have objected to some of the absurdities and intolerances of 21st-century political correctness may be tempted to claim an intellectual victory, to imagine that we have won an argument. I suspect the truth is more disappointing. Pronouns, festivals of remembrance and elaborate flags can disappear into what Stock terms “the memory hole” because a lot of people were never that deeply committed to these things to start with.
Obviously, for an influential minority of activists, highly visible on social media, such battles were consumingly important. But most people nodded along with radical new ideas about free speech, race and gender by default rather than out of sincere conviction. Some of them were probably older employees intimidated by younger colleagues. For others, I doubt it was even that dramatic. Many, perhaps, had a vague sense of themselves as “nice” people and therefore went along with the prevailing definition of nice. What looked from the outside like a steel wall of conviction may only have been a rickety palisade of complacency, apathy, conformity and frank lack of interest.
A mistake easily made by the sorts of people who spend their time thinking about ideas is to overrate how interesting those ideas are to everyone else. To some people — and the mere fact that you are reading a newspaper makes it likely you fall into this category — ideas such as “silence is violence” or “white privilege” or “deplatforming” are provoking enough to demand further interrogation. But the impulse is not universal. It is not possible for every idea that passes through the bloodstream of an organisation or a society to be independently interrogated and accepted by every one of its members. The result would be interminable argument.
Quite understandably, new ideas are simply not that interesting to many people. Not everyone can be interested in everything; computer science, numismatics and marine biology are not particularly fascinating to me. But the result, easily missed by ideas obsessives and culture watchers, is that people can vaguely adopt new concepts and theories without having thought about them that much and then lose them just as easily.
This is why fits of ideological passion are often surprisingly short-lived. The mid-17th century — that rowdy, restless age of Ranters, Levellers and Diggers — burned with radical religious energies that faded out remarkably quickly in the decades after the Restoration. Partly, Britain exported some of its religious zealots to America. But also fanaticism rarely goes as deep as it first appears.
Consider the extreme examples of Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Before 1945, the populations of those countries struck most outside observers as among the most militantly ideological in history. After 1945, both societies rapidly transformed themselves into successful liberal democracies. This is not (I hope it is obvious) to equate Nazism with wokeness, only to observe that even the most intense and alarming convictions are often more superficial than they first seem.
Wokeness will surely retain its influence in many parts of our society, especially in environments such as universities, schools and museums, where people really do care about ideas. But I suspect the fiery revolutionary phase is over.
A lot of people don’t care as much about ideas as I once thought they did. The realisation is reassuring in some ways: gales of passion soon pass. But it is also disturbing. Ideas don’t even have to make much logical sense to catch hold. What, I wonder, comes next?
