When did we decide that big businesses were our moral arbiters? Yes, companies have legal personality, but until around six years ago, the idea that they might have collective opinions would have left us utterly bewildered.
In a dizzyingly short time, we have come not just to accept a degree of political bullying from multinationals but to expect it. It started with low-level wokery: diversity training, ethnic quotas, arbitrary targets for female board members, and the like. Employees at the British headquarters of Accenture, the management consultancy firm, were told to wear rainbow-colored lanyards declaring themselves “allies” of various supposedly oppressed groups. Gillette produced TV adverts attacking toxic masculinity.
In 2017, Google fired one of its software engineers, James Damore, when he made the mistake of responding to a request for feedback after a diversity workshop. Damore suggested that the relative scarcity of women engineers was not wholly a product of discrimination and that there were differences between male and female brains that tended, in aggregate, to lead to different interests. His arguments were uncontroversial among neuroscientists, but they offended the Diversity Inquisition, and his dismissal was upheld.
It is worth noting that Google’s political correctness, as so often, is arbitrary. It emerged last week that the company’s “head of diversity strategy,” Kamau Bobb, had described Jews as having an “insatiable appetite for war and killing.” Jews make up the one minority that rarely qualifies for woke sympathy. They are altogether too successful, with their insatiable appetites and all.
It was only a matter of time before megacorporations went from imposing political values on their employees to pushing them at the rest of us. If last year’s Black Lives Matter unrest had not been the trigger, something else would have been. We had a foretaste the previous summer when Nike withdrew a set of sneakers because Colin Kaepernick declared that the Betsy Ross flag with which they were embossed was a racist symbol. He offered no evidence to sustain that claim — the same flag had fluttered at Barack Obama’s inauguration without anyone raising an eyebrow — but that didn’t matter. The first rule of identity politics is that hurt feelings trump hard data.
The year that woke corporatism went mainstream was 2020. Companies over a certain size were expected to rush out statements of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. To remain silent was now to invite censure. Once they reached that point, it was inevitable that they would get into party politics.
Before long, led by Coca-Cola and Facebook, woke corporates were attacking Republican policies and silencing conservative voices. Sensible and proportionate safeguards against electoral fraud in Georgia and Texas were attacked in partisan terms by, respectively, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines.
The business of an airline is to fly us from A to B on time and without too much discomfort — objectives that (and I don’t wish to sound unkind) the big American carriers are a long way from achieving. Couldn’t they focus on doing their jobs rather than finger-wagging at legitimately elected state legislatures that want moderate anti-fraud precautions?
How did we end up in this bizarre situation? It is one thing for government workers, universities, and parastatal agencies to go woke. But how did the megacorporations get into this game?
The answer, I think, has to do with the decline of traditional authority figures. In the 20th century, we were accustomed to the idea that certain people, by virtue of their position, got to lay down what was right and wrong — school principals, heads of families, and, above all, church leaders.
The authority of these figures has declined, but our craving for ethical guidance has not gone away. We want someone to define the boundaries, someone to articulate public morality, even if we don’t always obey its precepts. In an age that has made a religion of woke — an unusually superficial religion, based as it is on virtue-signaling rather than good deeds — carefully cultivated brand names assume a sacerdotal function. Companies that have invested vast amounts of time and money in being seen as reliable, benign, and friendly step into the role of priests.
So much for the idea that businesses are simply legal constructs, that only people have consciences, that we shouldn’t contract out our obligations to a random assortment of people bound by the vagaries of company law.
An entrepreneur is already behaving ethically by creating jobs and prosperity. The act of running a profitable business is itself profoundly moral. Firms have no business making charitable donations or running unrelated programs — that is for shareholders to do with their own money, not the company’s. And they certainly have no business lining up with anti-capitalist maniacs, as they may eventually come to understand.
