If the Pendulum Doesn’t Swing Back

“The implication is that culture and politics can be thought of as the bob of a pendulum swinging back and forth mechanically between the political left and the right, and that, at the moment, we are simply at the leftward amplitude of such a process.”

It is common when discussing the Great Epistemic Swindle or broader questions about the capture of our institutions (including academia) by the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) perspective for people to say, “Don’t worry. The pendulum will swing back.” The implication is that culture and politics can be thought of as the bob of a pendulum swinging back and forth mechanically between the political left and the right, and that, at the moment, we are simply at the leftward amplitude of such a process.

The main problem with this characterization of our current situation is that, empirically, it seems to be wrong. To judge this, consider the history of the CSJ perspective in academia as described by Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s book was published in 1987 and describes the period known for the emergence of the precursor to the Woke perspective, Political Correctness. Interestingly, however, someone reading Bloom’s book now could easily mistake it as a description of the contemporary university. There are, however, at least two important differences.

One is that whereas we tend to think back to the origins of Woke as being the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bloom describes the antecedent to the Political Correctness movement being the generation before the New Left and the radical student movements of the 1960s (he pinpoints the student rebellion at Cornell University in April of 1969, in particular). The student movements of the 1960s are described as being the beachhead of the CSJ perspective in universities; however, they were followed by a period of calm that one might characterize as the swinging of the pendulum back toward the right.