Counter Wokecraft by Charles Pincourt & James Lindsay

Author:Charles Pincourt & James Lindsay [Pincourt, Charles & Lindsay, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2021-11-24T06:00:00+00:00

2.6The Grand Tactic - Woke Viral Infection

The previous section considered many individual micro-tactics that are used to make Woke advances in universities. These micro-tactics can be seen as being in the service of the larger scale "grand" tactic, Woke Viral Infection, inspired by Lindsay 2020b.

As described in Chapter 3, the Woke political project is equity (the retributive redistribution of resources according to group identity), with redistribution flowing from historical "oppressor" groups to historically "oppressed" groups. The achievement of equity is to be done by overthrowing all existing institutions (committees, departments, faculties, universities, disciplines, funding agencies and governments), each of which is considered a site where oppression needs to be exposed and overturned.

In practice, such overthrow is ultimately done by gradually replacing non-woke with Woke participants. Since professors are the foot soldiers of university bureaucracies, the knowledge production system, and disciplinary machinery, the overthrow of the entire academic system is done through the recruitment of Woke professors. The advance is done first through departments, and from departments, to the rest of universities, disciplines, funding agencies and governments. When possible, this involves the removal of non-woke professors (see e.g. Section 2.4.2), but given the constraints posed by tenure, the key approach is to overwhelm rather than to purge. While most successful until now in the fine arts, social sciences and humanities, attempts to overthrow STEM fields are well underway.

The overthrow is undertaken in much the same way as a virus infects a cell. The allegory of the virus has been used both by proponents of the Critical Social Justice perspective (e.g. Fahs and Karger (2016)) as well as its detractors (e.g. Lindsay (2020a)). Viruses attach and then infect cells thanks to receptors on host cells. Receptors recognize and attach to proteins useful to host cells, but viruses can mimic the proteins and thereby attach to host cells. Once a virus is attached to a cell, it can enter it and use the cell's own machinery to replicate itself. Once replicated, copies of the virus can break free from the host cell to infect others and continue its spread (Freudenrich and Kiger; 2020).

Continuing with the analogy of the virus, we can think of sites of oppression as being the equivalent of cells that can be infected by the CSJ perspective. Each site of oppression has different receptors with the most common receptors being the "critical" and "diversity" receptors. These receptors can and are used to infect sites/cells with the CSJ virus. The most common and important sites for the spread of the CSJ virus are university departments and disciplinary entities since they are the gateways into the machinery and apparatus of the entire knowledge production system. Traditionally, infection has taken place primarily thanks to the "critical" receptor. More recently infection has taken place through the "diversity" receptor. Finally, the most worrisome current battlefront is infection through the "social/society" receptor in STEM fields.

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