Generally at GetReligion we try to avoid duplicate posts on one article, but Terry Mattingly has graciously agreed to let this piece follow his analysis of “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” I wrote it on the weekend, before I had any idea that tmatt had called dibs on a specific religion angle in this must-read piece in The Atlantic Monthly in a message to my more prolific colleagues.
Here, then, is my perspective. Trust me, there are many important topics in this piece.
George Packer’s 10,000-word essay on how hard-edged wokeness affected his children’s education is a stirring account of a liberal writer who has been backed into one too many corners by illiberal progressives and entrenched powers. Most of Packer’s work here makes me want to welcome him to the freedom of not caring what wokeness partisans think of you.
Packer describes conflicts in education first as a clash between democracy and meritocracy, sometimes with a self-effacing humor:
True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.
When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates — and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They’ll stay married, cook organic family meals, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a highly rated school district, pay for music teachers and test-prep tutors, and donate repeatedly to overendowed alumni funds. The battle to get their children a place near the front of the line begins before conception and continues well into their kids’ adult lives. At the root of all this is inequality — and inequality produces a host of morbid symptoms, including a frantic scramble for status among members of a professional class whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara but an acceptance letter from a university with a top‑10 U.S. News & World Report ranking.
What leaves me restless in Packer’s essay is the language he sometimes uses to describe the conflict. In disputing the school’s resistance to standard testing, he refers to the tests’ fierce opponents as engaging in “moral absolutism.” He later adds: “If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering — if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests — then, I thought, our son should take them.”
He later writes this pithy critique of identity politics:
In politics, identity is an appeal to authority — the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself — often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one — a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance — as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
But then Packer circles back to critiquing the movement as though its sins were those of the cultural right:
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.
These sentences may simply be examples of Packer hitting the practitioners of wokeness where it hurts. Who among them would want to be a moral absolutist, or orthodox, or one of the frightened citizens of Salem in the 17th century?
Still, from this distance it also seems like a reluctance to place the moral responsibility where it belongs: with a cultural left that readily tells people what they must think.
A concern for moral absolutes and orthodoxy does not generally lead to blood-letting on matters so anodyne as standard tests. The illiberalism comes from the identity politics, which is moral relativism on steroids: This is my truth, and society will affirm it, or I will call it out in righteous indignation.
Wokeness appears to have less to do with fear or mass hysteria than with a quest for power and purging the citizenry of those that groupthink depicts as enemies. The French Revolution may be a more apt comparison.
I hope my concerns are mere quibbles and that Packer’s essay is a prelude to other and similar critiques. For now, I am thankful for a most impressive start.
Photo of George Packer by Guillermo Riveros
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