Just How Broke is Woke?

 

Leonard Cohen once said of the 1960s: “I don’t think the sixties ever began. I think the whole sixties lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in somebody’s mind. I saw it move very, very quickly into the marketplace. I don’t think there were any sixties.”

There’s a movement, call it what you will,^[1]This movement can be called the woke movement or the Social Justice Movement, which is different from the notion of social justice (minus the capital letters). Linguist and author John McWhorter … Continue reading that wishes to be the ’60s on steroids. But like anything so artificially inflated (think bodies, stocks, housing prices) its day of reckoning is imminent.

The Elect’s unhealth can be found in the Black Lives Matter financial scandal, and in the creepy homogeneity of its adherents.

In a woke mecca like L.A., from the streets to schools of every level, from shopping districts and film industry rooms and sets there is little to no outward objection.

But things are changing. Spend time with reasonable people here off the record or even eavesdropping, as I have, and you will hear a widespread fatigue, even disgust.

Against the grain of our better selves

The disgust is deeply felt because so much of the Elect’s antics go against the grain of our better selves. We all know it. We all feel it.

These antics make up what I’d call a constipated world view, one constricted by its own illiberal ingestions. Its entire demeanor feels determined, incurious. To maintain its position it needs to continually gird against reasonable appeal. 

But no amount of indoctrination would seem to insulate a critically thinking person from this.

Refer to others derogatorily by their race? Insist that, due to race or gender, others have no right to speak? Then insist that another’s silence is violence?  Make others pay for your own unprocessed racialized paranoia? Replace a sense of law and order with zealotry and chaos? Move away from science (it’s racist!) and data and make a hard turn toward dogma? Self-righteously attempt to pass this dogma onto grade-school children?

Taken on their own, these actions might describe the world in the 1500s. Yet here we are in the 21st century contending with an anti-Enlightenment movement that is its own epidemic. And so contend we must.

As challenging as it may be to weather it—to witness another person resorting to “white male” as a derogatory phrase, to countless black women cast as the feel-good face of a corporate ad campaign,^[2]To move closer to the moral essence of all this, we can, and should, ask the basic question of whether such casting etc. would take place if it were financially unprofitable. all in the name of “diversity”^[3]One can reasonably question whether diversity also called for Persians and Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Uraguayans etc. to be considered.—the real toll must be taking place at the center of the movement.

Who really wants to live this way?

It’s really hard after all to preserve lies. Harder still to preserve lies that foster antagonism.

We are at a point where we can reasonably ask: Where does all this lead? How does it end? What will and should replace it?

After all, people don’t really want to live this way, do they? Does anyone really want:

• To live out the next 20 years in a state of hyper racial consciousness?
• To make our admissions, casting and hiring decisions based on race, rather than a host of other more truly meaningful, resonant and humanist factors? (Factors which, if used, would leave us feeling better about the exchange and outcome.)
• To feel as though we were complicit in this chronic prejudice either as an initiator or a recipient?
• To, as a result of all this, constantly call into question another’s motives, cynically sniffing out gestures believed to be predicated on racism and then making a show of it?^[4]A recent baseball incident occurred in which a Giants first base coach, Antoan Richardson, accused a Padres coach, Mike Shildt, of using language that “reeked undertones of racism.” … Continue reading

• To celebrate Black History Month after it feels like the entire year included a ceaseless stream of black history (see photo)—but not nearly enough history of other peoples who also inhabit our country?
• To have a so-called “conversation” that is now far more notable for what cannot be said that what’s actually said?

I can’t imagine many who really want to live this way, and I would have to question the motives (and even the overall mental health) of those who would.

I think deep down people want connection and understanding and this movement, despite its intentions, is a severe move away from that, for people of all races.

The path forward

So where do we go from here?

Many awakened people have provided a path forward. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have written the thorough Cynical Theories. John McWhorter recently published Woke Racism.^[5]Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody sheds light on the bizarre and anti-Enlightenment dogma that informs the … Continue reading

But we really have to decide on our norms. Speaking one’s conscience freely should top that list.

We need to speak up—without shame and without apology (please no more apologies!)^[6]Apologizing when you, upon careful reflection, are wrong is a virtue. Apologizing as an impulse borne out shame should be put on hold, pending further analysis. And capitulating to the demands of … Continue reading—on matters we care about.

And to do this one needs first to make a clear distinction between what, according to groupthink, one should feel and then what one does feel. (An effective comparison is to think of one’s personal relationship, distinct of others, to religion or a restaurant and its food or any work of art, be it a painting, a tv show or a piece of music.) This is a vital step and it’s rare under normal circumstances, let alone in a situation like the one we’re in where the Elect use the threat of public shaming and ostracizing—induced fear—as their weapon of choice.

Once that distinction is made it’s time to find situations in which to speak up. These can start small. They can start with a question aimed at merely basic assumptions held by the person or group in question. (Some of those are presented above.) They can shift to an overt and reasoned objection.

In all of this civility is essential. The more a person can use reason and civility as a means of confronting the illiberalism on display the better off they—and we—will be.

This whole period of our history, with its contrivances and social engineering and its intellectually weak concoctions of unfalsifiables, feels so damn fake. And that would be fine if its ramifications weren’t so real.

This is a test for the values—reason, science, humanism and peace^[7]For a far more expansive look at each of these themes, plus many more that have contributed to a better world, see Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now.— that, whether conscious of them or not, we hold dear. Those values are under threat by the Elect.

Getting to a place of progress will require that we get in touch with what we actually think and feel and then (again, here’s the key part) that we assert that. Some people may respond with shock and dismay and (based on what we’ve seen so far) horror. That is not your problem. Their feelings are less a statement about what you’ve said than about what they feel. That is a personal issue and may require further help from someone else—not you.

But many of the quiet ones in your midst will be relieved by your assertiveness, and in turn given license to also speak their hearts and minds.

It’s called leadership. We need more of it.