Reading, Watching 4.21.24
The Last, Best Hopes of Man
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
“Lord Byron is dead: he ... died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of freedom, for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and his epitaph!” — William Hazlitt
First off, as mandated by my publisher and the iron hand of the Internal Revenue Service, it’s shameless self-promotion time. I’m very pleased to share When The Clock Broke’s second review. It’s available now for preorder online or, even better, you can ask your favorite local bookseller to stock it.— June 18th is not too far off now!
Here’s what some satisfied customers have to say so far:
"Lively and kaleidoscopic." —Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
"[A] fascinating shadow story of the 1990s." —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show
"Lucid and propulsive . . . [When the Clock Broke is] woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary . . . Ganz's dry wit is ever-present . . . This is a revelation." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A searching history of a time, not so long ago, when the social contract went out the window and Hobbesian war beset America . . . Ganz makes a convincing, well-documented case that everything old is indeed new again. A significant, provocative work." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
There’s some new developments in the endless fascism debate, which I will not link to—yet. Stay tuned next week for another salvo.
Everyone should read medical intern Omar al-Najjar’s “In Gaza’s Hospitals” in The New York Review of Books.
In the The Forum, Hannah Gais has a piece on the genealogy of anti-woke rhetoric. Gais describes how anti-wokism is really a way of laundering the radical concerns of the far right—namely, the desire for a full-fledged attack on Civil Rights legislation—into respectable-sounding language:
Today, the words “woke” and “wokeness” in conservative cultural and political commentary represent a form of rot threatening the integrity of American institutions. “Anti-woke” rhetoric is now de rigueur for any Republican with national ambitions. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville blamed teachers’ unions for spreading a “woke socialism agenda” during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C. Presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley said during the same event a year prior that “wokeness” is “a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.” Former presidential primary candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who promised to turn the state into a place where “woke goes to die” after his reelection in 2022—continues to champion policies protecting children against “woke indoctrination.”
Yet, for all the monstrous danger that “wokeness” supposedly poses to the American body politic, finding a systematic definition of “wokeness” has long proved elusive. Even Chris Rufo, the ideological architect of the right’s closely aligned panic over “critical race theory” whom DeSantis conscripted to run the formerly left-leaning, publicly funded New College in Florida last year, told The New Yorker in 2021 that, “‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside.” In The Origins of Woke, Hanania aims to change that.
For Hanania, “wokeness” rests on three pillars. The first is the belief that “disparities equal discrimination”—meaning, any differences in pay or representation among people who are not white and/or not male is the result of systemic injustice. The second is that “woke” institutions rely on direct or indirect restrictions on speech, such as retaliatory firings or other forms of discipline, to silence those who disagree with their radical left-wing consensus, especially on issues like differences between races. The third is that “woke” institutions have imposed and maintained their hegemony through the formation of a “human resources bureaucracy.” These first two “pillars,” Hanania continues, define whether someone or something can be considered “woke,” while the third examples how “wokeness” can be expressed on an institutional level.
The Origins of Woke emphasizes a handful of cases and pieces of legislation that have supposedly created the conditions for “wokeness” to thrive. He dedicates an entire section to Title IX, which restricted sex-based discrimination in schools and educational programs that received federal funding. According to Hanania, Title IX has become “a method of social engineering” and a means of implementing legislation that flattens what he perceives as natural gender differences, such as men’s athleticism. Hanania also details how several prominent employment law cases lay the groundwork for “wokeness.” This includes less-discussed Supreme Court opinions like Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a 1971 case that established precedent for lawsuits on the basis of “disparate impact.” (In legal parlance, “disparate impact” refers to a situation in which certain criteria, such as requirements in the hiring process, can disproportionately target minorities despite appearing neutral.)
Undoing decades of civil rights legislation is not an easy lift, Hanania admits. “There will be no V-Day in the war on wokeness,” he writes. The battle for the hearts and minds of Millennials and Generation Z may be hopeless, Hanania laments, as they have benefitted from the current system for too long. Instead, Hanania argues that ending “wokeness” would require a fundamental reorganization of society around the principles of “merit and free speech” rather than those meaningless metrics of “equality.”
Friday was the the 200th anniversary of the death of Lord Byron in Missolonghi, Greece. Here is a part of William Hazlitt’s portrait of His Lordship in The Spirt of the Age:
Perhaps the chief cause of most of Lord Byron's errors is, that he is that anomaly in letters and in, society, a Noble Poet. It is a double privilege, almost too much for humanity. He has all the pride of birth and genius. The strength of his imagination leads him to indulge in fantastic opinions; the elevation of his rank sets censure at defiance. He becomes a pampered egotist. He has a seat in the House of Lords, a niche in the Temple of Fame. Every-day mortals, opinions, things are not good enough for him to touch or think of. A mere nobleman is, in his estimation, but 'the tenth transmitter of a foolish face': a mere man of genius is no better than a worm. His Muse is also a lady of quality. The people are not polite enough for him; the Court is not sufficiently intellectual. He hates the one and despises the other. By hating and despising others, he does not learn to be satisfied with himself. A fastidious man soon grows querulous and splenetic. If there is nobody but ourselves to come up to our idea of fancied perfection, we easily get tired of our idol.