Increasingly we live in a morally illiterate society. But how did we get here?
To review, we first rejected the church and its teachings, then the traditions of Western Civilization (both moral and philosophical), and finally the foundations of Enlightenment thought including reason and science (not to be confused with scientism).
It was decided that objective truth is false, thus the task of discerning reality was shifted to a newly fashioned, self-appointed clerisy who would disabuse America of its stuffy, outdated mores and replace them with new and improved ones.
Moreover, because the Enlightenment had failed in its quest to establish a moral basis for ethics apart from God, a new effort became necessary. Why? Because human beings are inherently moral, spiritual beings who require moral, spiritual authority.
Thus, “woke” culture was born, a faith-based religion mimicking the worst aspects of fundamentalism: rigid dogmas decreeing who is saved (the redeemed) and who is not, dividing the world Manichaean-style into good and evil, sinner and saint, and laying down a set of purity codes mandating the correct moral attitudes and actions required for salvation.
In the same vein we have become not just morally illiterate, but intellectually unserious as well. In general, contemporary culture fails to appreciate that ideas come from some place, that they have a history. They don’t just materialize out of thin air. And whether we know it or not, they determine how we think and act.
Thus far we have named some of these trends that over time have converged to form the basis of modern-day American thought. Yet there’s another set of ideas that continues to play an outsized role within this emerging theoretical matrix. And that’s Pragmatism, a uniquely American philosophy generally associated with John Dewey.
In short, Pragmatism rejects the belief that there is an existing body of accepted, received wisdom one must learn in order to be properly educated. For Dewey, knowledge is not something we obtain by means of historic disciplines, but from what is to be discovered on our own, sui generis. The only knowledge that matters, in other words, is gleaned from personal experience, and fashioned in the moment.
Such an approach demands studied skepticism, or what French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once dubbed the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (hermeneutics simply meaning “interpretation”). All knowledge, all received wisdom, is to be treated with mistrust. We must look for flaws and inconsistencies in all we encounter, and assume all information is inherently wrong, biased, or prejudiced. We create our own “truth.”
There is no viable connection to the past, only the pressing demands of an evolving now. New circumstances require we reject the ideas and solutions of the past, not least foundational principles which, by definition, subvert progress by systematically denying the practical actions needed to address the unique challenges of the present.
Of course, many Americans reject this way of thinking, in principle if not intuitively. Yet the credentialled gentry class has embraced them with gusto. As Stephen Soukup notes in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, traditional Americans are seen as “ignorant of the expertise required to function effectively or too selfish and self-serving to face their false consciousness, and thus require leadership on the part of an enlightened elite.”
It’s not terribly surprising, then, that eventually these same elitist prerogatives would attract the corporate world as well, and become internalized by executives, directors, planners, and human resource departments alike.
And though the corporate world has been a relative latecomer to the woke party, they appear to be making up for lost time, if recent events are any indication.
To understand this, at least in part, we must consider “stakeholder theory.” Originally conceived in business schools, the idea was to consider not just shareholders’ bottom-line but to “force managers and executives to see how their decisions affected different groups and how to best handle an array of often conflicting and competing interests.”
The logic, in short, was to help companies plan effectively for the future by better understanding what customers, employees, and others need and want. It was purely an analytical tool intended to improve performance going forward.
It’s essential to note that it originally sought to be descriptive, to align business priorities with existing realities. Eventually, however, it morphed into activism. Rather than relying on empirical data, it became a vehicle for speculative societal transformation. The language of “values” crept into the equation, many of which, Soukup notes, “were inapplicable or contraindicated by circumstances.” Nonetheless, it soon would become “a key concept in corporate strategic analysis and planning.”
“By the end of the twentieth century,” Soukup writes, “the idea of stakeholder analysis or stakeholder planning or the stakeholder ‘genre’…had become almost indistinguishable from any of the other tools in the ‘social science’ world.” Business, in short, was beginning to focus less on practical matters and more on social justice theory.
Which is not to say that all business leaders immediately jumped on board. Many were forced into it. Those claiming superior “values,” the right experience, and elite educational credentials (unlike the vulgar hoi polloi) found ingenious ways to influence the corporate world in pursuing “woke” ethics and “enlightened” business practices.
Perhaps the most effective tool used by this new class of corporate activists was the proxy shareholder strategy.
“Registered investment managers,” Soukup observes, “are often the proxy voters for fund shareholders on large institutional and high-net-worth clients.” Indeed, many investment managers use the services of proxy advisory services to push activist ideology when voting at corporate meetings.
“The executive-level effort to politicize capital markets and American business more generally,” Soukup adds, “is led by many managers from many companies in many sectors – high-tech, entertainment, retail, etc. But the greatest leverage is that wielded by large asset management companies.”
And these wield enormous power. In fact, the three largest asset management companies, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, own vast holdings in virtually every corporation in America. BlackRock alone owns roughly 22 percent of the typical S&P 500 company. Their proxy votes force companies to make decisions based on political, social, and environmental causes rather than in boosting returns or in maximizing fund performance.
There are also sizable blocks of other shareholders (and votes). These include, for instance, large unions and high-value state and municipal pension funds (think New York and California). Companies often have little choice but to accede to the demands of their activist shareholders.
In addition, over the last decade or so, a large network of self-appointed watchdogs has been established who demand allegiance to “Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG).” These organizations, in effect, impose an unofficial, external rating system onto companies.
Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance, for instance, collects data and rates over 10,000 publicly listed companies. Other entities such as the Corporate Equality Index and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board also make evaluations based on ESG criteria. [Spoiler alert: to get a poor rating is not good for business.]
Not only that, large central banks such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank seek “to impose on markets an unaccountable, top-down financial infrastructure that explicitly and enthusiastically rewards social and political behavior that serves elite interests and punishes dissent.”
This is to say nothing of the many ways official government instrumentalities regulate, control, and manipulate business. Or, for that matter, the problems associated with the Twitter mob and other organized protests and threats. It often makes more sense just to submit to the pressures hemming you in on all sides.
Perhaps the best example of such “woke” bullying can be seen in United Airlines’ recent decision to seek future hiring based on race, class, and gender considerations, rather than what one would assume to be their paramount concern, safety. Here theory supersedes practice. Other recent and notable examples include Major League Baseball, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola.
Thus, “the long march through the institutions” reaches maximal effect. The world’s wealthiest individuals and a subservient gentry class are now involved “in virtually every aspect of civic life, from the social to the economic, from the personal to the religious.”
Decisions that used to be made through pluralism, consensus, and democratic consent have become the sole province of a uniform, top-down, managerial process. Worse still, those making these decisions, as we have seen, are increasingly alienated from traditional understandings of religion, ethics, reason, science, and history.
In short, their goal is to radically alter human nature as well as the world, rather than adapting and conforming to foundational and time-honored truths. It is, alas, but a fool’s errand.
For, to paraphrase the economist Herbert Stein: if something can’t go on forever, it won’t.
Or, to quote the old margarine commercial, “It’s not nice to fool mother nature!”