Mick Hartley

Further to that Kevin McKenna extract from The Herald on "why corporate power and public sector influence has swung behind the campaign for trans rights", here's James Marriott in the Times this morning, looking at the same phenomenon with a broader lens:

International capitalism’s flirtation with the politics of the student union was always an unlikely one. The affair — passionate, confused, rather mad — had more of the air of an imprudent fling than of a serious commitment. Clumsy gestures at radical chic by Amazon, General Motors and McDonald’s — who could have predicted a ruthlessly profit-seeking fast food enterprise would end up fostering “healing spaces for Black individuals”? — would have delighted and astounded even the term’s cynical inventor, Tom Wolfe. He would also not have been surprised to learn they are now backing away from those ideas.

With hindsight, the phenomenon of “woke capitalism” is becoming more explicable. Anybody who has ever worked for a large company knows that strange notions and ill-conceived “initiatives” blow through such institutions like rotten autumn leaves through a ruined cottage. Sheer novelty is often a recommendation in itself. Though many executives were doubtless sincere, I suspect that for some of those now eschewing DEI, the term didn’t represent much more than another attractive buzzword in a corporate culture addicted to buzzwords. The upside to not really caring about ideas is that it is relatively easy to slough off the bad ones when you have tired of them.

Nobody at McDonald’s (with the possible exception of a penurious burger-flipping PhD student somewhere) is a committed scholar of Judith Butler. But in some sectors, most notably academia and the arts, these ideas are entrenched and sincerely held….

Friends working in universities report an atmosphere in which it is for ever the summer of 2021 — an eerily preserved Miss Havisham’s house of mouldering ideologies and stale doctrine. Many mediocrities have built careers on simplistic political interpretations of art and lack the talent to think any other way. They shore up their own positions by hiring like-minded people. Meanwhile, many of the “grown-ups” who protected the art galleries and the English departments in their care are drifting off into retirement.

In many places, the revolution has been institutionalised. Curriculums have been reformed. Books have been reprinted without their offensive passages. A couple of years ago, Tate Britain rehung its entire permanent collection to reflect fashionable sensitivities. Disapproving reminders that the subjects of paintings by George Romney and Thomas Gainsborough “participated in the trade of enslaved people” or “amassed [wealth] through Atlantic trade and plantations” are now part of the permanent story this country tells about its artistic heritage.

In the National Portrait Gallery (also rehung at the height of the woke moment), Samuel Pepys stands condemned to posterity as a sex abuser by the label fixed next to his picture. I sometimes wonder if I will live to see the curator intelligent enough to replace it with one explaining that his diary is one of the all-time wonders of human introspection and that Pepys’s extramarital excursions are not even the 100th most interesting thing in it. One strand of opinion holds that these organisations have the power to stamp their values on society permanently. But it is worth countenancing another future, in which those institutions still clinging to the fashionable ideas of the 2020s exile themselves from the mainstream and doom themselves to irrelevance as the rest of society simply moves on.

The big beasts of capitalism are already moving on. Bud Light, for instance, is focusing on blokey good humour now in their latest Superbowl ad, trying to put the Dylan Mulvaney disaster behind them. Universities and cultural institutions, on the other hand, are going to take a lot longer. The people there actually believe this stuff: often enough it's how they got their jobs in the first place. Sometimes a touch of cynicism can be a good thing.