The Italian Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico, who is often said to be the father of the philosophy of history, studied cycles of civilizations of the past. He observed that the rise of civilizations is marked by an evolution in communication, from mute religious acts to visual symbology to, finally, language, which allows laws to be articulated. Civilizational decline, on the other hand, is marked by an abuse of words and laws. In his New Science, Vico wrote that a “false eloquence” permeated the decline of Classical and Renaissance civilizations:

　　Yet when democracy grew corrupt, so did philosophy, which sank into skepticism. Learned fools took to maligning the truth. … People now misused eloquence. … Like furious winds lashing the sea, they stirred up civil wars in their republics and reduced them to utter chaos. Thus the state fell from its perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy, or the unbridled liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies.

　　A professor of rhetoric and law in Naples, Vico believed that language and laws represented the height of cultural achievement. He thought language and laws were a way of conveying senso commune, common sense, and piety, which he held to be the fundamental civilizing forces that pull humans out of barbarism. Vico believed that, when used honestly and properly, language and laws extend the radius of common sense and piety from the few to the many; but in times of cultural decline, they increasingly come to work against common sense and piety, rather than in support of them. Words originally designed as vessels for carrying truths are hollowed out, and new false meanings are inserted. Language is twisted to deceive—until deception becomes the norm.

　　Today, Vico’s theory is born out by the language of identity politics. It starts by hollowing out the word identity itself. Identity politics discards the human identity that unites everyone. It does not acknowledge the common-sense reality that we all share a common human nature, which leaves the illusion that finding common ground is impossible. Real individuals are treated as instantiations of abstract categories, walking chunks of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, oppression and victimhood, not real embodied individuals with unique minds, bodies, souls, and personal agency.

　　To add force to the “furious winds lashing the sea,” as Vico might put it, identity politics constructs epithets to praise and blame group identities. These ascribe some combination of stain, contamination, suspiciousness, malevolence, and abnormality. There are Churchill’s “foul” Hindus, Trump’s “shithole countries,” Joe Biden’s blacks who “ain’t black” because they did not vote for him, and wokeism’s “toxic masculinity” and “toxic whiteness.” If someone believes that kids should not be using puberty-blocking drugs, they must be “transphobic,” i.e. they must have a phobia, a mental disorder.

　　Each of these terms defies common sense—which, again, Vico found to be one of the hallmarks of civilization—by equating superficial, incidental traits with some combination of guilt/wrongdoing/contamination. But this equation is absurd, as incidental traits are properties of a thing, not entities in themselves. A skin color does not have moral agency.

　　Identity politics then redefines the words we use for relationships among group identities. A good example is the woke mantra “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. Of the infinite possible meanings of diversity, successful societies have embraced the common-sense diversity that Aristotle said was necessary for a flourishing community: a diversity of virtues, i.e. a variety of people who bring excellence in many areas, to make a society well-rounded, whole, and complete.

　　Wokeism replaces the societal aim of a diversity of virtues with the aim of a diversity of group identity affiliations. This automatically ensures that excellence suffers. As Joshua Mitchell alludes to in American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, wokeism redefines an individual’s contribution to “diversity” according to how distant their group identity is from the heterosexual white male. As the universal oppressor identity, heterosexual white men are dogmatically assumed to contribute zero to diversity, other than self-condemnation and acting as an “ally” for other identity groups. The term “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, and people of color) serves as a euphemism for “anything but white.”

　　As Vico outlined, identity politics uses words in false and malignant ways to undermine the institutions of society.

　　One result of this redefinition of diversity is Brown University, a bastion of DEI where 57 percent of students are BIPOC, compared to 36 percent BIPOC in the US population, and 38 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+, over five times the percentage among adults.At Brown, it seems the operating equation is

　　diversity = (BIPOC + LGBTQ+) – (white + heterosexual + male)

　　Again, when diversity is redefined to mean a diversity of group affiliations rather than a diversity of virtues, excellence must suffer. Indeed, the excellence of Brown’s viewpoint diversity—a cornerstone of the idea of the university—now approaches zero on the Kelvin scale. Brown Federalist Society founder Thomas Bickel called out his school for failing at using diversity and inclusion to promote excellence:

　　Brown’s chronic lack of countervailing viewpoints both within the student body and among faculty is unbecoming of an institution supposedly committed to diversity and inclusion. Put differently, it is difficult to understand how students could possibly receive a well-rounded education at Brown when the College’s [left-leaning] faculty and student body are almost all in ideological lockstep with one another.

　　Ironically, as Bickel points out, Brown’s redefinition of “diversity” has created homogeneity among viewpoints at Brown, defeating the universitys fundamental purpose as a place to exchange diverse ideas.

　　DEI also hollows out and redefines “equity.” In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines equity as the practice of making an exception to a rule that makes the outcome more just, in situations when a rule is too general to fit the particulars of a case. Laws are by nature general, says Aristotle. Life is too complex and dynamic for lawmakers to foresee and include all the possibilities. This does not mean that laws are bad, Aristotle emphasizes, but it does mean that some cases will inevitably fall through the cracks in the laws. When they do, equity is the attempt to make things right.

　　Examples of Aristotelian equity are so prevalent in America that we often take them for granted. For example, in K-12 schools, ESL track classes and special education embody Aristotelian equity. Having taught in China and six other countries, I can attest that many parents in foreign countries send their kids to American international schools hoping they will be more equitable toward their child’s special needs than local schools.

　　But what wokeism means by equity is destroying the rule, not making exceptions to it. For example, traditional equity would mean seeking exceptions to standard education that can boost lower-performing students to help them catch up and reach the level required for college admissions or APs, such as additional resources, tutoring, and supplemental courses. And traditional equity could also mean providing quality non-AP courses for students who do not qualify for AP or are not interested, so that they too can attain the highest level of education possible. Either of these options is in line with the essential aim of education itself, which is to raise students’ academic achievement.

　　Woke equity is the opposite. Rather than seek exceptions that help those who fell through the cracks reach the goal, it destroys the original goal and makes the exception into the rule. This can be seen in schemes to allow significantly underprepared students to be admitted to colleges or take AP classes, setting up both students and schools for frustration and failure. And it can be seen in high schools removing AP classes or calculus, or in Princeton’s move to remove the Greek and Latin language requirement for majors in Classics. Under the pretense of closing the “equity gap,” all these measures lower, not raise, academic achievement.

　　In short, equity was all around us long before woke equity attempted to redefine the term and monopolize its use. Rather than do the hard work of finding and implementing exceptions that help raise students up to the standard, woke equity strips society of its standards and calls it progress.

　　And among the other terms identity politics hollows out and redefines is “inclusion.” Identity politics movements couch themselves in the inclusive language of unity, from the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally to the Marxist slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” to the radical left’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” But in reality, all of these movements are fundamentally about excluding and demonizing some “oppressor” group, and thus they only deepen and entrench divisions in society.

　　As Vico outlined, identity politics uses words in false and malignant ways to undermine the institutions of society. It uses words to radicalize factions and foment civil discord. This works especially well at universities, where using words at a high level is a fundamental tool of the trade of teaching. We have to recognize the importance of getting words right, because, as Vico pointed out, civilization depends on it. We have to take words back from movements that trade on false eloquence. As New York City mayor Eric Adams recently said of the Pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and Im not going to wait until its done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it. This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children.”

　　The late Jewish civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Herschel said, “There can be no nature without spirit, no world without the Torah, no brotherhood without a father, no humanity without attachment to God.” Identity politics obsesses over brotherhood and is fond of the term “solidarity.” But it has so hollowed out this word, that it never stops to recognize that in uniting identities against other identities, it is uniting brothers against brothers. Bereft of any notion of a common human nature, or the recognition that we are all stained and in need of forgiveness, the only solidarity that identity politics can ever know is a brotherhood without a father.