The human drive for self-preservation is so strong it can lead us to act against our better wishes, for both self and society. Such was the case with McCarthyism and such is the case now with the woke movement.
While we would do well to applaud the work of several academics and public intellectuals in outing the bunk and lies of the woke movement, the real litmus lies in what the everyday citizen does.
This is where real transformation occurs—and where the crisis lies.
If we’re not careful, this crisis—built on moral panic and fed to a culture drunk on social media—will be with us long after we’ve brought COVID under control. This crisis centers around bad ideas and its tentacles reach into and affect our sense of honesty, freedom, decency and civility, data and science, dignity and, yes, fairness.
The woke epidemic
Put simply: the woke movement is an epidemic. That is to say it is a disease (of both morality and thought) and it has spread as such.
I used to look at the illiberal/identitarian left and see at least its good intentions (even as I deplored its imminent outcome). No longer.
The woke movement is actually built on its own brand of hostility, grievance and racism. It gives cruelty a veneer of justice.
It’s making us more racist, even running roughshod over our children’s education.
And speaking of our children, in the same way we might inoculate them against COVID we should do the same with the disease of woke. The ultimate inoculation? Education. But educating our children isn’t about getting them into a good school and then passively doling out the work to others (who increasingly now propagandize with woke).
We have a responsibility to offer antidotal views and, above all, to model critical thinking skills. That’s what should be meant when we say “our children’s education is our responsibility.”
Our crisis
We are indeed in a crisis. And right now this crisis exists in its virulent form because of human cowardice, because for far too long people who know better have been too afraid to speak up. They long ago joined the ranks (the black Instagram squares were a key moment) and in the end these people are far more interested, as a close friend has said, in feeling good rather than doing good.
I don’t take Hitler/Nazi comparisons lightly (in fact I’ve never used one on any politician in my lifetime, regardless of my disdain) but this current moral and ethical complacency—this collective silence, so bizarre in the face of known wrongs—echoes what allowed Nazism to spread and take hold.
Hollywood is in a silent but highly combustible state on this matter of woke illiberalism. The inflicted absurdities within the industry lurk, appalling people of all walks of life. But as with the blacklist and the pre-#MeToo era people with a strong moral conscience have been rendered paralyzed with fear.
Parents at public and private schools are in a similar state. Too paralyzed to speak because they wish to keep drinking from the capitalist cup they pretend they abhor.
Who wants to give up a directing gig indefinitely? Who wants their kid to be rejected by the Ivys? Even more sadly who wants to give up a grip job or an internship or a promotion to the next rank because you didn’t profess your proper religious-like allegiance to the cause?
Silence as Violence
Speaking of private, there are private conversations taking place. Everywhere. I know what these contain. But I also know how bizarrely silent people get when you go certain places.
And I believe this silence is a problem. Not just for now. But years and decades from now. To have participated in, advocated for and upheld a system—yes, a system—that has been consciously engineered to prejudge people on race and gender, and to have taken advantage of that while decrying acts of racism and genderism—all in the name of self-preservation (and, yes, self-advancement) while innocent people lose their reputations and livelihoods—is an act of profound hypocrisy that I don’t think people easily escape.
In the absence of pathologies designed to ward against it, guilt erodes the soul.
Woke-ism’s days should be numbered, such is the already broken nature of its ideas. But it either extends its toxic reign, or we start, as an act of courage, to rein it in.
So if you’ve gotten this far you now have a choice. The good among us, including our children, need you to make the right one.