The elite is not woke out of selfflagellation, but out of self-preservation

The new elite calculates that adding Woke Quotient to its IQ, plus effort, will help consolidate its position at the top still further

In his classic The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) Michael Young defined merit as “IQ + effort”. This formula perfectly captured the spirit that animated one of the greatest revolutions of our times. The Civil Service reforms of the mid-19th century introduced open competition in order to populate Whitehall with Rolls-Royce minds who could apply themselves to any problem. The 1944 Education Act selected children for grammar schools on the basis of their general intellectual ability. The entire revolution was designed to replace the lazy ne’er-do-wells who once ran Old Corruption with hard-working public servants who were necessary to run a modern state.

We are now witnessing a concerted attempt to add a new component to Young’s formula: “WQ” or “woke quotient” — indeed “WQ” is rapidly becoming far more important than either IQ or effort. Once again you can become a member of the elite if you’re not particularly bright or hardworking so long as you have a high enough woke quotient: that is not only the right set of beliefs on race, gender and colonialism but also a willingness to make as much fuss as possible about those beliefs.

What is now called “wokery” began life on the margins of academia, with impenetrable French scholars such as Michel Foucault and improvised academic disciplines such as women’s studies and black studies. But it has now been embraced by the entire global elite. Billion dollar consultancies such as McKinsey and BCG boast about their commitment to equity in a way that they once boasted about their commitment to shareholder value. Eton has a full-time director of inclusion education and a plethora of right-on societies such as The Feminism Society and the LGBTQ Society. Black and women’s studies have now taken over many soft academic disciplines.

It is easy to make fun of this revolution: isn’t the very point of Eton (which charges £48,000 a year and only admits a few girls at sixth form) exclusiveness? But it is also naïve. The elite hasn’t taken up wokery out of a taste for self-flagellation, let alone self-marginalisation. It has taken it up out of an instinct for self-preservation. The past few decades have seen the emergence of a quasi-hereditary ruling class as old avenues of social mobility (most notably grammar schools) have disappeared, and two career couples have taken to buying ever more educational privileges for their children. The new elite calculates that adding “WQ” to “IQ” and effort is a way of consolidating its position at the top still further.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class the economist Thorstein Weblen demonstrated that, when it comes to the elite, there is a sharp distinction between the real function of social arrangements and their purported function: thus charity balls were not really ways of raising money for the poor but instead were ways of both demonstrating wealth and status and of consolidating that wealth and status by making sure that the right people met and married. The same tension is at work with wokery. The overt preoccupation with the excluded is actually a way of demonstrating that you are one of the included, and the addition of WQ to IQ and effort is a way of holding on to elite status that might be threatened by the rise of new groups. This is why wokery is much more virulent in elite universities than in lowly further education colleges. The student who tabled the motion to remove the portrait of the Queen from Magdalen College’s Middle Common Room, Matthew Katzman, on the grounds that Her Majesty represents “recent colonial history”, is the son of a multimillionaire American lawyer who was educated at Washington, DC’s most exclusive private school and Stanford University before arriving in Oxford. And this is why the core elements of wokery are forever changing: there is no better way of excluding those who aren’t in the know than by constantly inventing new phrases, new transgressions and new etiquettes.

The great virtue of the old meritocratic revolution that was described by Michael Young was that lower-class boys and girls could make it into Oxbridge and the national elite so long as they had the right intellectual equipment and the right work ethic: hence the radical change in the composition of the British elite in the 1950s and 1960s. The addition of WQ to Young’s formula makes any similar revolution much more difficult because it allows society’s gatekeepers to blackball newcomers for making faux pas about the ever-changing woke moral code however high their IQ or Stakhanovite their work ethic.