Review of 'The Third Awokening' by Eric Kaufmann
The book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the state of our culture today.
Written by Noah Carl.
If the culture war were a physical conflict, Eric Kaufmann would have attained the rank of general.
He’s one of the most prolific scholars of wokeness, having authored dozens of germane reports and articles. He helped craft the British government’s Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill, which was given royal assent last year. And he recently launched the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham (a non-woke private university in Britain). Kaufmann even bears some battle scars from his time in the trenches, having been dragged through four – repeat, four – investigations by his former employer. In one tribunal, he was accused of “metaphorically wishing to kill a colleague” because he’d used the phrase “slay the dragon” in a book review. Such are the vagaries of academia.
The point is that few people are more qualified to write a book on wokeness than Eric Kaufmann. And his latest offering, The Third Awokening, does not disappoint.1
The book provides a comprehensive guide to the unprecedented shift in the culture of the English-speaking world that has unfolded since the early 2010s, and which has been appropriately dubbed the “Great Awokening”. It therefore complements other, similar titles such as Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke.
Kaufmann begins with an admonition to his readers: rumours of the death of woke have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, its opponents have won some victories with boycotts of woke corporations and bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, but that doesn’t mean the battle is over. After all, the woke remain substantially overrepresented in centres of cultural influence like media and education. And perhaps more significantly, young people are disproportionately woke. Which means the ratchet of generational replacement may take us, ineluctably, to an ever woker future.
Where did wokeness come from? The key event for Kaufmann was black radicalism during the Civil Rights era, which gave rise to what he calls the “big bang” of the race taboo. Over a relatively short span of time, liberal elites became intensely exercised about the plight of black people – their change in outlook spurred more by guilt and compassion than any revolutionary impulse. They also began to imbibe the activists’ identitarian rhetoric and Manichaean worldview, setting the stage for the illiberal social engineering that succeeded the Civil Rights Act.
Kaufmann’s account of woke origins therefore differs from both Rufo’s and Hanania’s/Caldwell’s in that he posits a largely bottom-up process, rather than one driven by a small cadre of academics or the judges who reinterpreted Civil Rights law. Regarding the supposedly crucial role played by the Frankfurt School, he argues that its members were not as woke (or proto-woke) as is often claimed. For example, Theodor Adorno once called the police on student activists who disrupted his lecture, denouncing them as “left-wing fascists”. As for the claim that wokeness flowed naturally from Civil Rights Law, Kaufmann notes that even when legal pressures were temporarily eased in the mid 1980s, most large companies continued to comply with affirmative action.
Another question Kaufmann addresses is why Republicans went along with the left’s social engineering for so long – or at least until the early 1980s. And he has a satisfying answer: it was the middle of the Cold War and they were focussed on the threat of socialism. To take just one example, the Nixon administration devised the Philadelphia Plan, which required government contractors to hire minority workers, in a cynical attempt to weaken Democrat-supporting labour unions.
What should be done about wokeness? Kaufmann advocates an unapologetically interventionist strategy, whereby the state gets involved and actually forces institutions to be neutral. This is in contrast to the hands-off approach favoured by some classical liberals, which calls for changing the culture through persuasion – or else giving up on compromised institutions and trying to build alternatives. Should Big Tech firms be able to ban people based on their political views? Kaufmann says no. Should schools be free to teach dubious and divisive subjects like Critical Race Theory? Kaufmann says no. Should public buildings be able to fly the LGBT flag and make other blatantly political statements? Again, Kaufmann says no.
The Third Awokening has a number of obvious strengths. The first is that it is eminently fair-minded and judicious. While Kaufmann’s critics on the left might be inclined to dismiss him as another “right-wing grifter”, such a charge would be wholly unwarranted. His heavily footnoted, 400-page book is a far cry from the flippancy and irreverence of social media. Kaufmann is not merely preaching to the choir; he is writing for any reasonable person who will listen.
Another strength of the book is that it provides an extremely thorough review of the relevant survey evidence. Indeed, Kaufmann probably commands a better understanding of what the woke believe than they do. This is hardly surprising, since he was the one who collected most of the evidence. A case in point is a survey of 1,500 Britons aged 18–20, which found that those already enrolled at university are no more supportive of political correctness than those who intend to enrol but haven’t yet done so. As Kaufmann points out, this suggests that school and not university is the primary site of woke indoctrination.
A third strength is that the book is brimming with interesting facts and tidbits. I didn’t know, for example, that despite affirmative action being overwhelmingly unpopular among conservatives, only nine US states have banned it – and five of them are blue or swing states. By contrast, 13 states (all of them red) have banned abortion. Nor was I aware of an amusing survey carried out at Phillips Academy Andover (an elite East Coast boarding school) which found that 86% of female students considered themselves feminists, compared to only 49% of male students.
Notwithstanding these strengths, there are a couple of points on which I’d respectfully disagree with Kaufmann. The first is terminology. He insists on using the unlovely term “cultural socialism” throughout his book, rather than the much more fitting “wokeness”. One reason he does this, I suspect, is that the former sounds more academic. Yet a strong intellectual case can be made for the latter – as I myself have argued. Another reason Kaufmann prefers “cultural socialism” is that he wants to draw an analogy with economic socialism. However, the simple fact is that the term hasn’t caught on (see below) and if you’re going to refer to an “Awokening”, you might as well use “woke”.2
My second quibble with Kaufmann concerns an important omission from his “12-point plan for change”. The list makes no explicit mention of the need for an open and frank discussion about the causes of intractable group differences. Kaufmann does talk in general terms about “reconstructing the all-or-nothing big bang race taboo”, but that’s it.
Why is this important? Much woke activism is motivated by a simple and incontestable observation: racial groups in the US and elsewhere have dramatically different outcomes when it comes to crime, socio-economic status and cognitive ability. Woke activists assume these differences are due to racism – its historical legacy, as well as its contemporary manifestations. Some go as far as suggesting that things like statues of slave-owners, the names of insect species, and innocuous statements such as “the most qualified person should get the job” contribute to a kind of oppressive miasma that holds certain racial groups down.
Given these beliefs, it is perfectly logical for the woke to go around toppling statues, renaming species and banning “microaggresions”. Indeed, their singular focus on racism makes a great deal of sense. After all, if racism were causing blacks to be imprisoned at six times the rate of whites, to earn 35% less income, and to score a standard deviation lower on IQ tests, then doing everything possible to fight it would be a moral imperative. Why should blacks have to face a sixfold higher incarceration rate just because whites aren’t willing to “check their privilege” and “do the work” necessary to become “anti-racists”?
It follows that in order to defang wokeness, you have to put forward a compelling alternative explanation for group differences.3 Vague appeals to “poverty” won’t do. First of all, disparities in poverty rates are one of the things we’re trying to explain. Moreover, large differences in criminality and cognitive ability are visible even in the highest social classes. For example, the sons of black families at the 99th percentile of the income distribution have the same incarceration rate as the sons of white families at the 33rd percentile. Similarly, the black-white IQ gap is no lower in the top decile of parental SES than it is overall.
This leaves two broad classes of explanations: those that emphasise culture, and those that emphasise genes.4 Both are controversial – the latter much more so. Regardless of which you find more plausible (it may be that each has something to contribute), a no-holds-barred discussion about causes of group differences would seem essential to achieving Kaufmann’s aims.
Disagreements aside, the book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the state of our culture today. It should prove particularly instructive for the few remaining conservatives left in academia, as they scramble to get their bearings in an increasingly strange and hostile environment.
The Third Awokening is available for purchase in the US and Canada, and is available for preorder in the UK. You can listen to the core concepts from the book at Liegent. Use code APORIA10 for a 10% discount on your sign-up.
Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.
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The Third Awokening is the title in the US and Canada (released 14 May). Taboo is the title in the UK and the rest of the world (released 4 July).
Another possible reason he opts for “cultural socialism” is that he locates the origins of woke back in the 1960s and is aware that “wokeness” wasn’t widely used before 2015. On the other hand, “woke” first emerged as a political term in the mid-20th century, making it entirely apposite for his uses.
This is a point that has been made in recent months by Nathan Cofnas, Bo Winegard and Amy Wax (all three of whom are beleaguered/cancelled scholars).
“As Kaufmann points out, this suggests that school and not university is the primary site of woke indoctrination.”
Does he also consider pop culture influences? I can think of tons of examples where the woke message is subtly (and not so subtly) delivered in various movies/TV shows. This started in a big way in the late 1960s.
No...that's not it. Eric Kaufmann has obviously put a great deal of effort into his new book, but I do not agree that he has the correct explanation for WOKE.
WOKE is totalitarianism. And totalitarianism is far more than a political style. It goes way beyond the political.