The origins of Wokeness

Paul Graham's essay argues that wokeness is a recent form of an old pattern, the moralistic "prig," and that its origin lies in the political correctness of the late 1980s. He says that political correctness, which he defines as an aggressively performative focus on social justice, began in the humanities and social sciences because those fields allowed politics to shape the work itself, unlike physics. He ties its rise to 1960s radicals gaining tenure, to a shortage of other moral causes after religion and sex faded as targets, and to the Soviet collapse, which weakened Marxism as a source of moral purity.