Equalitarianism & Its Consequences

The fundamental error of wokeism: the belief that all demographic groups have roughly equal socially valued traits and, therefore, that all outcome disparities are caused by cultural forces...

Written by Bo Winegard.

In the past five years, an ideology often called wokeism has spread rapidly, from college campuses to corporate bureaucracies to the editorial pages of elite newspapers. Because wokeism does not have an official text or sanctioned dogmas, its precise doctrines are indefinite. Some have argued that this creedal indeterminacy demonstrates that wokeism is an invention of its enemies, an absurd caricature, an ideological effigy created to be torched. But the essence of wokeism is clear enough.

It presents a Manichean vision of the world in which racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and motley other bigots persecute and oppress minorities while protecting their own place at the top of a hierarchy of privilege, creating vast disparities in income, incarceration, police shootings, and other victimizations. This ugly reality of injustice and exploitation is concealed like a corpse beneath a blanket of exalted rhetoric about freedom, meritocracy, and color blindness. Thus, the morally enlightened person must resist the beguiling distortions and hypocrisies of liberalism while striving to dismantle the oppressive status quo they disguise.

Some contend that this apocalyptic ideology has proliferated because of the decline of religious belief, the mind filling its spiritual void with the quixotic quest for racial and sexual equality. This is a plausible conjecture, one which merits serious scholarship. But in this essay, I am interested in the underlying premises of wokeism, not in the causes of its swift spread through our institutions. Primarily, I am interested in the fundamental error of wokeism, an error more often assumed than articulated, namely, the belief that all demographic groups (e.g., races, sexes, religious groups) have roughly equal socially valued traits and, therefore, that all outcome disparities are caused by cultural forces, perhaps especially by discrimination.

This mistaken belief does not inevitably lead to wokeism. One could believe that all demographic groups are equal on socially valued traits without embracing a Manichaean ideology. But it does make wokeism more plausible and appealing. For, if demographic groups are equal on socially valued traits, why do they have disparate outcomes? Racism is a reasonable answer. The conservative may retort that some cultural variable or another, perhaps fatherlessness, causes social disparities, thus obviating the need for the hypothesis of widespread racism. But this position, being implausible and simply pushing the causal explanation back a step (what caused disparities in fatherlessness?), is not terribly persuasive.

Thus, a fair conclusion is that the belief in literal human equality encourages wokeism just as the belief in limitless human plasticity encourages utopianism.

For roughly a decade, my colleagues and I have studied this belief, equalitarianism, and its downstream effects on attitudes about fairness and censorship. Perhaps fittingly, academic journals have persistently rejected our articles—whether because of their quality or their content, I’ll let the reader decide.

The first and perhaps most predictable result of studies was that people on the political left are much more likely to embrace equalitarianism than those on the political right. For example, when asked how much they agree (1- do not agree at all; 4- somewhat agree; 7- agree completely) with the claim that “All ethnic groups have equal abilities on all tasks,” progressives (those who scored most liberal on a scale of political beliefs from 1 to 7) enthusiastically agreed, averaging almost 6.0, whereas reactionaries (those who scored most conservative) only somewhat agreed.

Answers to the same question about men and women followed a similar pattern. 

Thus, although people across the political spectrum at least somewhat endorsed equalitarian beliefs, those who were further left endorsed equalitarianism more enthusiastically. This pattern was replicated when asked if discrimination was the current cause of disparities between men and women and among different ethnic groups. 

In general, then, American adults support equalitarian beliefs. However, such support is more pronounced on the political left. And those on the political left are much more likely to blame discrimination for current disparities than are those on the political right.

This premise, that demographic groups are largely equal on socially valued traits, has important downstream consequences. And it causes predictable biases. In study after study, we found that those on the left were more likely than those on the right to apply double standards to information which challenges equalitarianism.

The design of our studies was straightforward: We randomized participants into one of two groups who received a vignette that stated that either Blacks (Blacks higher condition) or Whites (Whites higher condition) or men (men higher condition) or women (women higher condition) scored better on a particular test (IQ or college admissions exam) and then asked questions about the plausibility or fairness of the test.

For example, in the Black/White experiment, participants received one of two versions of this vignette (the other condition is in the parentheses throughout): 

“Researchers from a large research institution have discovered a gene that might explain intelligence differences between Blacks and Whites. For many years, researchers have found that Blacks/(Whites) score higher on certain intelligence tests than Whites/(Blacks). Tom Berry and his colleagues have tried to find the genetic causes for the disparity in intelligence scores, arguing that environmental explanations cannot explain the IQ gap. ‘There is simply no reasonable explanation for the IQ gap that we can find or that other researchers have proposed,’ Dr. Berry explained.

Berry and his team think they have an answer. They isolated a gene on the 21^st chromosome that is reliably associated with higher IQ scores. The gene polymorphism, called THS-56RR, was first found in 1999, but researchers didn’t know that it was related to higher IQ scores. Berry and his team found that it was strongly related to IQ scores.

They also found that the gene is much more common in American Blacks/(Whites) than Whites/(Blacks). ‘About 93% of Blacks/(Whites) carry the gene,’ Dr. Berry said, ‘whereas only 10% of Whites/(Blacks) carry it. We really think this might explain the IQ gap.’”

In the Black/White experiment, participants answered six questions (e.g., “How credible do you find Dr. Berry’s argument?” and “Do you believe Dr. Berry’s argument?”) on 7-point scales from 1= Not at all to 7 = Extremely/Definitely. These were combined into one index, which we called argument credibility. As predicted, liberals evinced double standards such that they found the argument more credible if Blacks were said to have higher IQs than if Whites were. However, in the Black/White experiment, conservatives did not display this double standard.  

The same basic pattern held across many studies. However, when the target was men/women, both conservatives and liberals displayed the equalitarian double standard (i.e., thought the condition favoring women was fairer and more plausible).

This belief in the fundamental sameness of races and sexes leads to important consequences, including support for censoring information which challenges it. We found this in multiple studies, with the same double standard as before: Support for censorship increased if the target was a sacred victim group (e.g., Blacks, women). For example, in a study of 559 adults about censorship on college campuses, we consistently found more endorsement of censorship if the information appeared to threaten a victim group than a privileged group. 

For the studies, we created fictitious (but believable) passages that we claimed were from books and asked participants whether those books should be censored on four questions (e.g., should the book be removed from the library, should a professor not be allowed to require the book for class).

The passages were experimentally manipulated so that participants read only one of two potential versions of each. We created these with the sacred values of equalitarianism in mind, choosing three low-status (women, Muslims, Black people) and three high-status targets (men, Christians, White people) for the manipulation. In one version, the high-status group was portrayed negatively; and in the other version, the low-status group was. For example, one passage read:

“Researchers have argued that men are better leaders than women. That is, genetically, men appear better able to lead large groups of people. Because of this, it is not only fair, but positively crucial, that more men are leaders than women.” (pg. 25)

The alternative version of this passage read: 

“Researchers have argued that women are better leaders than men. That is, genetically, women appear better able to lead large groups of people. Because of this, it is not only fair, but positively crucial, that more women are leaders than men.” (pg. 25)

The two other passages are below. The parentheses show the alternate version of the passage. Again, participants read only one version of each passage.

“Islam (Christianity) was a powerful ideology that spread rapidly across the Arabian Peninsula. It was also a violent, warlike religion that promoted domination of other people. To this day, it inspires hatred, bigotry, and even terrorism. Many scholars have suggested that Islam (Christianity), of all religions, is particularly hateful and likely to motivate gruesome crimes and bigotry.” (pg. 345)

“Scholars have suggested that White (Black) people score higher than Black (White) people on intelligence tests. It is likely that at least some of this gap is caused by genetics. That is, Whites (Blacks) are genetically smarter than Blacks (Whites).” (Pg. 64). 

We expected that people, but especially those on the political left would be more censorious of information that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably compared to that exact same information when it portrayed high-status groups unfavorably.

In our first study with 559 U.S. adults, results supported predictions. People were generally more censorious of passages that appeared unflattering to low-status groups than the same passages if they made the same claims but about high-status groups. As can be seen in the figures below, these double standards were especially pronounced among those who reported that they were political liberals. For ease of visualization, we created three categories, liberal (those who answered 1-3 on political scale), moderate (4 on political scale), and conservative (5-7 on political scale). 

For our next three studies, we followed the same procedure, but recruited young adults and university students. We also expanded our coverage by gathering data in the United States (449 young adults), the United Kingdom (128 undergraduates), and Hungary (480 undergraduates). Scholars have argued that younger people are particularly committed to equalitarianism and thus perhaps more desirous to censor potentially threatening information than older people.

Results were generally consistent with the results from the previous studies and with our hypotheses save that the overall support for censorship, especially for the passage which threatened or derogated low-status groups, was higher.

The view that sexes and races are roughly equal on socially valued traits is a priori implausible and virtually no evidence supports it. Nevertheless, it appears to be widespread, especially among progressives—though it is also held by many conservatives. Wokeism is a predictable though not inevitable result since wokeism is animated by the belief that social disparities between races and sexes are caused almost exclusively by racism and sexism. 

Because sexes and races are different from each other and have slightly different abilities, they will inevitably have disparate social outcomes. Just as women will never have equal representation in domains that depend upon upper body strength, so Blacks will likely never have equal representation in domains that depend upon cognitive ability. Current norms and sensibilities strongly discourage candid conversations about intrinsic differences; therefore, people become equalitarians almost by default; and in the absence of an alternative explanation for vast disparities, the belief in widespread racism and misogyny thrives. This in turn contributes to a zealous ideology, wokeism, that assails what it sees as the dishonest pieties of liberalism—free inquiry, free markets, free speech, color blindness—because it views them as a rhetorical veil that hides the reality of pervasive bigotry. 

Equalitarianism is the seed from which wokeism grows. The best way to kill wokeism is to kill the seed. 

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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