Quote:
Wokeness, most observers would agree, can be defined as the progressive worldview that views all racial and sexual disparities as proof of discrimination, and rejects liberal procedural traditions in favor of a totalizing politics that seeks to dismantle those disparities and silence dissenters. But nobody seems to agree on where it came from. Is wokeness an intellectual, religious, psychological, economic, legal, or institutional phenomenon? Its emergence over the last decade or so has been attributed to everything from academic intellectual trends, declining religiosity, victimhood psychology, corporate self-interest, white-collar class interests, the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and the copycat tendencies of large organizations. These all seem to have some explanatory power, but none seems on its own to account for the phenomenon fully. Let’s consider each in turn.
Comment:
Do you agree with this article, or any part of it?
How do you think the destructive ideology of wokeness came to be so widespread, and how could it be defeated?
He’s probably right that all those factors rogether contribute to it. But I suspect there are also actual people behind the scenes who have been directing it.
The thought leaders of the Left, whoever they are.
There seems to be a vast army now of people who follow their directives, such as the woke school teachers, politicians, media parrots, Antifa, BLM.
It seems ridiculous that it has caught on, because it is all so obviously stupid, illogical, and irrational.
So maybe theres also an element of mass psychosis to it.
As to how it can be defeated…not sure, but one way to start is get political power back and ban it all.
Why is the author concerned with finding a Unified Theory of the Origins of Wokology? What is the point? Origins are inherently susceptible to mystification - see the Woke attempts to locate the origins of racism in American at the origins of America. It is not as if agreement on Woke origins can result in agreement on how to unravel it. Wokeness is a mysticism. Telling the Woke that they are the heirs of certain (primitive) ways of thinking (Christianity, sympathetic magic superstition, gnosticism, historicism, post-modernism…) will not prompt a thorough re-thinking of their beliefs. The Woke take pride in their regression to primitive modes of thought. Nonsensicality is not a bug, it’s a feature of Wokery.
The Enlightenment offered us ways to bypass mysticism of origins (accepting the existence of undesigned, unplanned “spontaneous orders”, including life itself, disallowing divine right authority, asserting the norm of equality before the law as a “self-evident” truth, ). It is pointless to reach an agreed explanation on how magical thinking in its current form emerged. It needs to be marginalized. Is what is left of our institutions up to the task of sustaining the “norm”? i.e. can the Law withstand the latest antinomian assault? Can the “norm” be reclaimed by a majoritarian-democratic legal process that has been systematically delegitimated and “de-normed” by democratic majorities?
How can the political process be saved from becoming a cargo cult? President Trump tried to ban CRT training from institutions of state too late in his term, and Biden reversed those executive orders on Day One of his administration. Woke is now so entrenched in private and public institutions, in our culture, that voting in anti-woke officials at the top will not undo the habits of mind of the Great Brainwashed. Perhaps while non-Woke majorities hold sway on the Supreme Court we can work our way back to reality, repealing legislation from the federal bench (as we have recently done with Roe v. Wade), cutting back the excesses of Civil Rights Act interpretation, overruling disparate impact precedent, returning the distinction between de facto and de jure, dismantling piece-by-piece protected class jurisprudence. A Republican majority (of the right temperament) can defund the universities and state contractors perpetrating Wokery. Perhaps Republican governors can disempower the teacher’s unions, rethink teacher credentialing, reshape the state-mandated curriculum. Voucher systems could foster the formation of non-Woke education. Perhaps at the grassroots level parents can change who decides what happens in the classroom, schoolboard-by-schoolboard.
But can parents keep the new witch-doctors away from their children? We are one step away from an Obamacare mandate to insurance companies to issue policies for children to be mutilated early, to given them a head-start on their gender-journey through life.
I think it’s important to know the origins because it’s not something that just developed organically - it is being perpetrated by certain people with an agenda. The current generation of leftists.
They, and their lies, need to be exposed and destroyed.
The article is informative but I believe the answer is simple. Class warfare failed to establish communism. The new tactic was to use charges of racism to argue for communism, or what it is now called, equity. Equity is equality of outcome, the goal of communism. Recasting every issue as one of racism silences debate as people cower in the face of such charges even when they are baseless.
Thank you for your contribution to this discussion, Jason P. And very welcome you are to the Forum!
I think you make an accurate point. When the commies gave up on the workers - because the proletarians of the First World became prosperous and now enjoy being bourgeois and do not want to change “the system” that has been good for them - the theorists chose the “unemployed and the unemployable” (to quote Marcuse), non-whites, Third Worlders, vagrants, criminals, lunatics, drug addicts, and women to take their place. (The class Marx the arch-racist had dismissed as the “Lumpenproletariat”, plus women). That was the big change, the coming of the new to create the “New Left”, and “wokeness” is just the latest fad term for New Leftism - plus a variety of accretions added by technologies and time like barnacles on a boat.
(The Comintern had actually ratified a change of emphasis from"class analysis" to “race analysis” as early as 1926, but it only had an effect in Europe’s African colonies.)
In addition to which, there must be millions of ridiculous private reasons why millions of individuals
joined the vast club of the woke - on the ground for rioting, looting, arson and murder, and in the ether on the “social media”.
