Comment by bachmeier
5 days ago
You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being persecuted, and imposing standards of morality on others was the reason those groups existed. The bigger the fight you started, the better.
This is like writing an essay criticizing WalMart for paying low wages when every competing business pays the same or lower wages. Not false, but definitely not the whole truth, and obviously misleading.
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
ironically paul graham has an essay about reading journalism as a subject expert and immediately knowing that the writer is writing about subjects that they don't know much about.
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Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion:
> Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes.
I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left.
> and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
> it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left
He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
Not to mention marking any mention of "cis" as hate speech. This is not a recognised slur, it is only treated as such on Musk's whim, because he personally dislikes it.
You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.
I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's.
There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
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