Self-indulgent Efforts to Define by Descriptively Characterizing Wokeness, However Frequently Enlightening when not Entertaining, Offer No Prescription to Counter it
Just Call it Social Justice god damn it
Months ago in a New Years blog post I made, titled “Half a Dozen Words Whose Use I Would Endorse Cancelling,” one word I listed that I would like to do away with is woke. I said I didn’t like its nebulousness whose ambiguity has potential to inspire such indiscriminate fear or panic, I’m worried the right mainly has adapted the concept for propagandistic purposes, to advance their authoritarian statism, the result of which overdetermined reaction only reinforcing and legitimating the left’s own totalitarian project.
Ron Desantis for example blatantly uses wokeness as a crude smokescreen to experiment with authoritarian state building, using Florida as a laboratory. He even named his most extreme bill the Stop Woke Act. In full acknowledgment of the terrifying threat to democracy wokeness however poses, I did not propose to ignore it by doing away with the term, but only to suggest that in order to better eschew the right’s extremism, and to better defend against the left’s excesses as well as to do it justice, I offered a blander phrase, for the sake of accuracy, which is more truthful and intellectually honest—social justice. Social justice is a simple two-word phrase. It is all we need to understand and box in this extreme progressive ideology.
Since one problem with woke, is that it’s so incoherent that anything can be woke and also nothing is, it’s a malignantly polarizing term. It can indicate anything socially liberal—ranging from all Democrats to all LGBT people. It can also just be a slogan for reactionary Trumpism or Desantisism. The reactionary right can smear anything the left have any association with at all as woke. For example Republicans are even demonizing Silicon Valley Bank as a Woke bank. Progressives can also retaliate that the right is psychotic, because apparently everything remotely to the left of the extreme right, for the right, is woke. In zero sum fashion each extreme can either exploit the incoherent word, or the indiscriminate reaction it incites, to further their own farcically unhinged antidemocratic agenda.
This hasn’t stopped a wave of more or less disinterested columnists from trying in vain to define wokeness. After a right wing pundit stumbled on her internet show trying to define Woke, it unleashed a flurry of activity vying to offer the best definition of wokeism. Not that they failed to offer good explications and interesting insights—I think rather they’re wasting energy attempting to trace its intellectual pedigree and offering their own take characterizing it. To talk about the ideology of the left and handle it on its own terms, I suggest we stop splitting hairs characterizing it when it is only the logic of the principle of social justice that matters. Nevertheless let me share with you what some moderate commentators have said. Below Ross Douthat for the New York Times,
“What is America all about, at its best? Equality and liberty. What is the left all about, at its best? Transforming those ideals into lived realities.
But this project keeps running into limits, disappointments and defeats. Everywhere you look, terrible disparities persist. And that persistence should force us to look deeper, beyond attempts to win legal rights or redistribute wealth, to the cultural and psychological structures that perpetuate oppression before law and policy begins to play a part. This is what the terminology of the academy has long been trying to describe — the way that generations of racist, homophobic, sexist, and heteronormative power have inscribed themselves, not just on our laws but our very psyches.
And once you see these forces in operation, you can’t unsee them — you are, well, “awake” — and you can’t accept any analysis that doesn’t acknowledge how they permeate our lives.
This means rejecting, first, any argument about group differences that emphasizes any force besides racism or sexism or other systems of oppression. (Indeed, the very measurement of difference — through standardized testing, say — is itself inevitably shaped by these oppressive forces.) Even differences that seem most obviously biological, like the differences between male and female athletes or the bodies that people find sexually attractive, should be presumed to be primarily culturally inscribed — because how can we know what’s really biological until we’ve finished liberating people from the crushing constraints of gender stereotypes?
It also means rejecting or modifying the rules of liberal proceduralism, because under conditions of deep oppression those supposed liberties are inherently oppressive themselves. You can’t have an effective principle of nondiscrimination unless you first discriminate in favor of the oppressed. You can’t have real freedom of speech unless you first silence some oppressors.
And all of this is necessarily a cultural and psychological project, which is why schools, media, pop culture and language itself are the essential battlegrounds. Yes, economic policy matters, but material arrangements are downstream of culture and psychology. The socialists have merely gentled capitalism, the environmentalists have merely regulated it. If you want to save the planet or end the rule of greed, you need a different kind of human being, not just a system that assumes racist patriarchal values and tries to put them on a leash.”
I thought this was really good. Nick Catoggio for The Dispatch defines it as, “
“…the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture.” And, I thought this was a smart observation,
“What we mean when we talk about “wokeness” is progressives trying to assert cultural hegemony by using institutional or economic pressure to wrench the Overton window to the left with respect to not-yet-agreed-upon norms.”
That the left is trying to coerce people to accept a normative framework, that for all their talk about heteronormativity say, has everything to do simply with enforcing new norms. Or I could put it like this, progressive “inclusion,” in Diversity Equity and Inclusion, really means dogmatic exclusion. I appreciated the paradox Catoggio points out, that in a dystopian way they’re also trying to enforce their worldview by manipulating you to accept a consensus which is not universally recognized as consensus, such as that one factually is what they identify as in their mind. It’s true. They’re trying to aggressively normalize their radical worldview by aggressively defamiliarizing us with our own cultural assumptions, whether with indoctrination at universities, or campaigns of intimidation online, or DEI bureaucracy in the workplace.
When Ron Desantis calls this phenomenon “woke mind virus,” he’s being very crude, but he is not wrong. What strikes me as so offensive about this extreme leftism is its attempts at brainwash. They are quite literally trying to alter your consciousness to get you to embrace their agenda. It’s atrocious, and deeply degrading to our humanity, that these leftists are presupposing our plasticity, and then attempting to exploit it.
However one does not need to go far trying to understand it, define it and describe it, at the worst obsessing over it, to determine that the radical left is insane and dismiss it out of hand. The one principal issue with wokeness consists in the logic of social justice, of which what we call wokeness is just the apotheosis. By referring to it simply as social justice, we pinpoint the problem with it which is this, by distinguishing its unseemly origin: social justice is incompatible with constitutional democracy insofar as social justice for groups is by necessity injustice to individuals. For as long as we care about democracy we cannot accept the social justice ideal, because the means to their end is to overthrow the rule of law, to impose an arbitrary ideal of “equity” on everybody else but themselves, who by implication deserve whatever they feel entitled to demand. They don’t believe in equality before the law. The morality of the movement is at odds with the ideal of universal equality. This is the problem with social justice in itself. The American legal system, that is English common law, let alone individual rights, is just a political tool of colonial oppression to them. While the right rejects wokeness for other cultural reasons (grooming, biological sex, parental rights), they only demonstrate how illiberal they are, just the same as the extreme left.
The Neoliberal Case Against the Left
To reject wokeness for principled reasons though, all one has to observe is how they make the mistake of committing the fallacies over and over, that white people today are responsible for the racism committed by their ancestors generations if not centuries ago. Or that the racial wealth gap is the product of the SAT. They’re just committing a logical fallacy, mistaking unpleasant effects for convenient causes. In philosophy this is called the genetic fallacy. Correlation does not imply causation. The SAT is not responsible for the racial wealth gap, no more than getting rid of the SAT or provisioning black people more money would fix the racial wealth gap. Also they commit the genetic fallacy when they accuse white people of their privilege, implicating guilt by association. If one is white it does not increase or follow that one’s skin color or historical background makes one more likely to be, let alone automatically make one, a racist.
Arguably it’s the other way around. Just to think like this begs the question. It reveals how racist you are to assume people can be typified by stereotypes about race, that is whether white people are privileged people who play tennis to you, or black people are drug addicts. I think that just to presume to judge and make inferences in the terms of race and historical background is equivalent to racism, though of a different degree than the assertively prejudiced kind. To be clear, beyond these fallacies, the logic of social justice is wrong on its face, as long as you accept that ideally in a democracy people are equal before the law; and you accept that to think otherwise would be tantamount to challenging the whole philosophical-moral basis of the democratic order.
To condemn social justice as antidemocratic moreover, all you have to observe is how the $5 million reparations progressives propose to give each individual black person in San Francisco over slavery, are unjust infringements on taxpayers who are not black, many of whom would inevitably disagree that that’s a fair use of taxpayer money. —It’s first of all discriminatory, and it’s outrageous!
In addition all these efforts by one group to get included, respected and recognized are all rooted in the collective envy or resentment unilaterally directed towards one arbitrary privileged group. The right indulges in this, too, just the same by attacking “globalists,” “elites” “Washington,” and “RINOs.” We might call this right wing social justice. Or right wing Marxism. This is all insane because they presuppose that because someone was excluded socially or culturally it means, that political concessions should be made to appease their societally induced particular grievance. This is flat out absurd in itself, on its face. It is actually the pettiest thing that I have ever heard in my life. And it’s an incredible sign of how low humanity and western civilization has sunk; among other things because of the internet, and it being generations since the last global conflict.
Social justice is wrong because for example it presupposes hypothetically that because ugly people aren’t as attractive as pretty people, then pretty people as a political principle of Rawlsean justice, should pay reparations to ugly people. Or skinny people should make concessions or pay reparations to fat people. Strong people for weak people. Old people for young people or the other way around. Healthy people for unhealthy people. Perhaps smart people should have their IQ’s stunted at birth so dumb people can’t feel stupid. Where does this communist cannibalization of social status end? Where everyone who is deemed to have any advantage is supposed to pay for it with reparations or concessions or attention or respect to the disadvantaged?
Populism is where democracy eats itself. Everyone wonders how democracy will end in the west. Democracy ends where law-abiding, self-respecting normal individuals, who don’t scapegoat, are trampled on by the tyranny of the unconstrained mob of the miserable herd majority who convince the uncertain and sympathetic of us that their grievances have a legitimate basis in reality.
But they have no basis in reality.
—Jay