TODAY IS
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2021
TRUMP’S THREE-HUNDRED-AND-NINETY-SECOND DAY OUT-OF-OFFICE
IS ILLEGAL RESIDENT JOKE BIDEN*S AMERICA SCREWED UP OR WHAT

The Wages of Woke Ignorance
Part One

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Education is a zero-sum game. Every decision to read one book entails not reading another. For every language mastered, yet another is shorted.

What to study is as important as studying anything at all. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Woke is many things—Marxist, nihilist, cruel, incoherent, and especially careerist and grifting. But we forget it functions on the principles of the old Soviet commissariat.

Thousands of unproductive auditors and clerks scan hiring, admissions, curricula, and reading lists. They are busy canceling, de-platforming, ostracizing, and Trotskyizing. In general, they produce nothing and know less, but consume capital and labor to ensure ideological purity contrary to human nature.

Their one claim to productivity—lessening tribal and racial tensions, eliminating bias, and thus unifying employees and employers to become more efficient and productive—is tragically comic. Yet our diversity czars do the very opposite. They prompt people to reexamine and obsess over DNA, and to calculate how they can become a victim rather than be libeled as a member of the victimizing class. Binaries are the goal with nothing in between.

By definition, wokism must seek to destroy merit in its quest of ensuring equality of results. According to its innate logic, wokism substitutes race and gender for demonstrable standards. Woke is the familiar face of ideological zealotry that now pushbacks with “Racist!” and “Sexist!” instead of the old Maoist “Running-dog capitalist!” or the Stalinist “Enemy of the people!”, “Counterrevolutionary!”, and “Capitalist stooge.” The tools of enforcement—censorship, ostracism, and depersonalization—are logically the same.

The architects of this destructive mess are by needs ignorant themselves—as they must devote what limited talent they have to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” These agendas produce no goods and services, do not advance knowledge, erode meritocracy, and endlessly fixate over our superficial appearances rather than worry about who and what we are inside.

We were reminded of the woke destructiveness in an otherwise irrelevant tweet.

Remember Nikole Hannah-Jones the upper-middle-class “historian”-journalist who is perpetually aggrieved when universities do not promise her tenure in advance for having scant scholarly or teaching credentials?

She remains infamous for The 1619 Project. That was the crazy idea that America began not with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or even the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. Americans instead were created in 1619 the moment the first African-American slave landed on North American shores.

That is, slavery—an evil institution dating back to the dawn of civilization, and de facto existing still in places in Asia and Africa—defines the entire American experience. America then was born racist to the core, 157 years prior to the Declaration when millions of immigrants to America were not yet born, and would not arrive until centuries later, never own slaves, and in many cases never meet a slave or ex-slave.

In such a vast nation, without sophisticated communications, millions of Americans pragmatically often defined their nation as a local culture within a radius of 50 or so miles from their farms. They were oblivious to what had transpired 500 or 2,000 miles distant.

A farmer in northwest Michigan had zero idea of what Alabama was like, had never met an Alabaman, and likely would have trouble communicating with him, given vast accentual and vocabulary differences. Read diaries of Sherman’s northern agrarian marchers into 1864 Georgia; most thought they had entered a foreign country and were bewildered by, but immediately loathed, slavery. They were astounded and confused by southern speech, the climate, the weather, the crops, the lifestyle, and the culture.

My grandfather (1890-1976) left California one time in his 86 years, to New Mexico in 1973 for 5 days. He was born and went into a final coma in the same room, where I now sleep. I first left California at 18 in 1971 to take the Yale intensive Ancient Greek course. When I returned that summer, my fascinated grandfather, in the age of jet travel, peppered me with questions, asking what the people and places were like “way back yonder.”

Northerners would strive to end slavery in their new nation that in the Southern and border states had legalized that infernal institution—eventually to the point of losing 700,000 American lives in a population of just 30 million. (e.g., comparable in 2022 to 7.7 million American dead).

In such logic of totalizing sin, why not redefine the origins of America as the moment a native-American was killed by a non-native-American? Or the moment the first indentured servant set foot on North American soil? Or the first exploited Chinese worker?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Member of the Board of Advisors for both the Independent Institute as well as its quarterly journal, The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.