Paul Graham's error

"Harvard has changed; Harvard has never lost."

It goes without saying that I have enormous admiration for Paul Graham—as a writer, a coder, and a businessman. In fact, he is much more successful than me at all three of these things, which is infuriating.

But at least as a historian, Graham is refreshingly out of his depth. It is not his fault. He thinks he is standing on a concrete foundation, not a pit of rubble and slime. He can see that he is wading in slime—but he thinks there is a floor. So does everyone.

There is no floor. There is no foundation of final narratives. No one is ready to read history till they understand this. For instance, I don’t think anyone has yet written a really good history of the 20th century. Maybe that will take not just the 21st century, but the 22nd. We understand the Romans better than they understood themselves.

Cringe is anything that lets others see you better than you see yourself. A fundamental principle of history (from Leopold von Ranke) is that every era stands equal before God. One corollary is that every era is, in its own ways, cringe—it has some attributes for which all other periods in history would not just condemn it, but mock it ruthlessly. What are those attributes in our period?

What makes history hard is that you never know where you are. History is like pitch. Even most musicians only have relative pitch, not absolute (“perfect”) pitch. They can hear the distance between notes, but not the frequency of the notes.

Imagine if the political phenomenon we call “left” versus “right” worked like this. You would have no way to sense where you are absolutely on the left-right spectrum. You would only be able to position yourself relative to the local period around you. No need to imagine—this is indeed how it works.

Moreover, humans can hear only a narrow range of the frequency spectrum. Outside 20 to 20000 hertz, there is no sound per se. There is vibration, explosion, etc. When reading the past, our normal reflex is to process events inside the local spectrum as news, and those outside the spectrum as history. This is also a subjective distinction.

Paul Graham entered Harvard in 1982. Coincidentally, he saw “political correctness arise” in the 1980s. At that time it was news to him, and also the world:

When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.

Imagine if Harvard had, by the same process and at the same time, become Islamist. In 1982, someone might object if female students wore something they considered un-Islamic, but no one was getting reported for it. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed like everyone on campus was wearing a suicide vest…

Now, it’s important not to confuse Islam, which is tolerant, with Islamism, which isn’t. The historical phenomenon we need to focus on is the transition between the two. How and when did tolerant Muslim scholars turn into intolerant Islamic prigs? Paul Graham is on the case:

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

You see: he completely gets it. Paul Graham has relative pitch. His story of the world that he himself experienced is perfectly distilled. Nothing is wrong in this overview.

And yet—it is an interesting coincidence that the phenomenon he is studying arises exactly when he becomes an adult, and can see the news with his own eyes rather than relying on the history that he was taught. News starts in 1982. Before that is history. News may be a lie, but at least it can be compared with your eyes. History is… words.

Imagine if Paul Graham had grown up in the USSR, and entered college in 1982. In the present, in the world of news, he would have noticed the deviations between the noble ideals and the somewhat grubby praxis of Marxism-Leninism.

In the world of history, though, his understanding of the Great Patriotic War, the Russian Revolution, etc, etc, would be unmarred by his personal experience of the late Brezhnev era. Most important, he would perceive the failures of his era not as consequences of Marxism-Leninism, but rather as corruptions of Marxism-Leninism. Imagine how hard would be to fix the USSR by making Marxism-Leninism work as well as it should work in theory.

Of course, the USSR was an Orwellian state that lived in its own distorted reality. Lol. So it’s obviously completely different. Lol. Certainly, we would never Frankenstein-stitch a distorted, but still real, present reality onto an almost totally tendentious past.

What is social justice, Paul? What does this pair of words literally mean? Is it clear from the words themselves, or does it require some context? What about progressive? Is its meaning clear from the word itself, or does it require context?

I think both require context. They are labels for an underlying historical phenomenon. “Islam” is a label. The Arabic word just means “submission.” The word predates the historical phenomenon and is obviously not related to it.

Are these words related? Are they related to this word “woke” (which obviously does require context)? Maybe to be “woke” is to be a “priggish progressive” who priggishly makes a “shallow, aggressive” use of “social justice.” Could we agree on this? Maybe:

It’s people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.

Notice that Graham has neatly mindkilled himself from his original historical insight:

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment.

The problem is that Graham is interested only in “wokeness,” this hypothetical combination of “priggishness” and “progressive social justice.” But priggishness is a human universal. There is no history of priggishness. So why not drop it?

Instead, if we could just focus on the history of these mysterious idea, “progressive social justice,” we might actually get somewhere. Every society has prigs. Islam has prigs. The question is: how did Harvard become Islamic? Once Harvard is Islamic, let’s take it for granted that prigs will make it “Islamist.” We can answer the question in a value-neutral way, forgetting all about our prigs. (There were Nazi prigs, too.)

Graham is even on this one:

A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues.

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn’t lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn’t have any real power. The students may have been talking a lot about women's liberation and black power, but it was not what they were being taught in their classes. Not yet.

But in the early 1970s the student protestors of the 1960s began to finish their dissertations and get hired as professors. At first they were neither powerful nor numerous. But as more of their peers joined them and the previous generation of professors started to retire, they gradually became both.

Simply forgetting his injunction to follow the ideas and the priggishness separately, Graham keeps using mysterious code words that mean “priggish ideas.”

It will certainly be news to even the most orthodox historians of the 1960s that the student protests “didn’t have any real power.” To their enemies, they were terrifying, and of course their enemies cowered before them.

Not only power, but violence, was far more in the air. Read the story of May Day at Yale 1970. Hillary Clinton! The Black Panthers! The FBI! Read Days of Rage by Bryan Burroughs. Bombs—hippie bombs—were going off in America every day.

To say that the Panthers at Yale—or, more to the point, their young supporters, such as Hillary Clinton—did not have the power to police speech at Yale, in 1970, is true. First: they wanted it, then. Second: they got it, later. Third: they have it, now.

The origin of AIDS is not when when you come down with Kaposi’s sarcoma. The origin of AIDS is when you get infected with HIV. Implausible as the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS may be, it pales before the idea that the origins of “political correctness” or “wokeness” are somehow independent of the 1960s.

Actually, Wikipedia has a very useful page for the (proximate) “origins of woke.” Look up the phrase New Left. You will discover that this mysterious essence, “wokeism” or “political correctness,” is nothing more and nothing less than the New Left in power. Or, as it was sometimes called at the time, “the Movement.”

It is far better to say “progressive” and “social justice” than “PC” or “woke.” When in doubt, describe groups with the words they use to describe themselves. The longer they have been using these codewords, the better—the harder they are to change.

Graham exhibits the neat little pretzel that power has turned his brain into:

This [political correctness] was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?

Recall, if you lived through this time, the three meanings of this funny word, “woke.” In 2015, it was black slang meaning literally “politically conscious,” or in practice “progressive.” By 2020, it had spread universally to white progressives. Then it was noticed by white conservatives, who identified it with all the worst results of 2020 brand progressivism in power.

As soon as its enemies targeted the label, it vanished from the tongues of its acolytes, in an almost terrifying display of reef-squid camouflage. When Elon Musk, at Twitter, uncovered a lost locker full of #STAYWOKE T-shirts from the era of Jack Dorsey and Deray Mckesson, it was like opening King Tut’s tomb and meeting Tut himself. No one in 2023 could quite believe that progressives had once called themselves “woke.” While this was far from the most insane Orwellian moment of the early 2020s, it was compelling enough that even Paul Graham has retconned his memory of the word.

Curiously enough, “politically correct” followed just the same arc. It was over before 1982—roughly around the time elite American scholars were finding out that in future, they would face academic penalties if they failed to lube up for the New Left. Obedient, they bent—as they probably would for Islam, and maybe yet will.

I actually tracked down one of the earliest usages of “politically correct”—so early that it was pronounced differently. Instead of “politically CORRECT,” at this time, you said “POLITICALLY correct.” But the phrase is the same and the year is 1934. The author is Walter Benjamin. My italics:

I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency.

For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency – that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.

I bet that clarified that for you! Welcome to turgid 1930s Marxist “theory.” It may even be clearer than turgid 1960s Marxist “theory,” though it is basically the same product.

What Benjamin (pronounced “Benyamin”) is telling us is that art, to be good Marxist propaganda, has to actually be good. By “correct” he means correct according to the Party line. This is a common usage in period Marxist jargon. In fact, even Wikipedia—not exactly an esoteric source—is almost right:

The phrase politically correct first appeared in the 1930s, when it was used to describe dogmatic adherence to ideology in totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Early usage of the term politically correct by leftists in the 1970s and 1980s was as self-critical satire; usage was ironic, rather than a name for a serious political movement. It was considered an in-joke among leftists used to satirise those who were too rigid in their adherence to political orthodoxy. The modern pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century, with many describing it as a form of censorship.

First, Nazi Germany has nothing to do with this word. Second, we have already seen the term being used sincerely by 1930s Marxists. Third, there are a number of missing decades between the 1930s and the 1970s, most notably the 1940s and 1950s. As the previous Wikipedia link taught us, “political correctness” was known then as well:

According to the American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “[t]he term ‘politically correct’ was used disparagingly to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in equalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.”

A New Left implies an Old Left. You let Wikipedia teach you about the New Left—now learn about the Old Left. Note: in both cases, the thing is writing about itself.

TLDR: originally, “politically correct” was used sincerely, by Communists, supporters of Stalin, to denote a loyal submission to the Communist Party line, Stalin’s personal whim. Later, it became opprobrious and was used by anti-Communist Socialists as a negative label for this obviously repulsive behavior.

Finally, by around the time Paul Graham was going to college, it was discovered by conservatives, who were obviously puzzled as to why, long after the death of Stalin, their engineering professors were being required to obey this distant successor of Stalin’s party line—now long since detached from any centralized organization, but still with the same maniacal junkie desire to compel and control and dominate that defines the “prig.” Prigs, like Nazis, really like shooting people in the back of the neck.

Well—it was a different time. But if you’re interested in the related American practice of cancellation, there is no better book to consult than Vivian Gornick’s recently rereleased Romance of American Communism. Gornick, a New Leftist, is writing in the ‘70s about the Old Left in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Or try Bella Dodd’s School of Darkness—she was actually on the Politburo. The American Politburo. Then she was cancelled. Actually for being in the wrong faction, but nominally for racism. Yes, in the 1940s.

In fact, we don’t have to deal with these meretricious labels—we can go directly to the real words. Marxists.org has beautiful archives of the New Masses, which was more or less the New Yorker of the mid-century American Communist, and The Communist, which was actually the orthodox house journal of the CPUSA. Just search for the word “progressive.” You’ll find it means “supporter of the Party, not necessarily a member.”

If you think the Old Left didn’t matter in its heyday—try Eugene Lyons’ Red Decade. Heck: you could see a movie that just came out, Oppenheimer, in which we learn quite incidentally that almost everyone in the UC Berkeley physics department in 1939, in fact probably including Oppenheimer himself, was a Communist.

So much for Graham:

Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.

If it began in the “humanities and social sciences,” then, it must be at least 100 years old. Obviously, literal Marxism dates back to the 19th century.

But can we go further? There is another odd clue in Graham’s sincere wonderings:

I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses.

It is indeed a religion! And if we had to compare it to the closest thing that we call a religion, we might find ourselves saying something like “Unitarian Universalist.” Is UUism a religion? Is it progressive? Is it woke? Hm… what a brilliant insight on the part of Paul Graham.

When we are tracing the history of religions, not ideas, we are on much firmer and better-trodden historical ground. We find that Unitarianism is in fact one small branch of mainline Protestantism, which happens to be the original religion of the United States—or at least, New England.

For instance, Harvard has been Unitarian since 1805. It has been mainline Protestant since 1636. And it has been using the words social justice since the late 19th century.

The ideas of Harvard in 1636 and 2025 are very different! But they are continuous and uninterrupted. Harvard has never been sacked. The institution has been in the hands of a continuous generational society for almost four hundred years. Where else would we find the origin of any dominant American tradition? Harvard has changed; Harvard has never lost.

If dinosaurs are birds and birds are dinosaurs—and they are—progressives are Puritans. Even if they seem like the opposite of “puritanical.” Tyrannosaurs did not fly. Cotton Mather was not transgender, or even polyamorous. And yet—logic is logic. (And the long interaction between Marxism and Protestantism is deeply fascinating.)

Oh, well. Look on the bright side—there’s nothing here that Islam can’t fix.