Notes on Wokeness
The word “prig” isn’t very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google’s isn’t bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.
There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.
So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.
The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
