Smarter people - the type that make good engineers who’d deliver early - think critically about everything, not just their job. What you think of as “woke” is often composed of the compassionate, deeply reasoned ideology that such a smart person creates. It acts, practically, as a theodicy, something any coherent non-nihilistic worldview requires.

Similarly, many smart engineers arrive at opposing world views with less emphasis on the problem of evil and more on a pure rational understanding of the nature and history of society.

These two clever camps, admixed with America’s ideological chaos, rarely see one another clearly. The rationalists think the “woke” people are idiots for engaging with irrational intangibles of identity, and the woke people think the rationalists are cruel for refusing to admit any place for subjective experience in their expectations and understanding of the world around them.

I do think the rationalists miss rather more of reality; we are not in a Greg Egan novel. But the wokeists are ignorant of the spectre of ethnic conflict in human history, of the evil foreshadowed in glorifying identity and subjective experience.

Hopefully the market will eventually sort it out.