One of the most frequent criticisms of so-called wokeness is that it consistently operates in bad faith, strawmanning complex systems and individuals as racist, misogynistic, etc. But how can one criticise wokeness itself in good faith, while using that label to refer to it?
Although woke began as an African-American vernacular term meaning conscious of one’s own oppression, the word is now primarily used ironically and pejoratively by those who identify as anti-woke, rather than as something people self-identify as. Woke has become a bad faith term: “the term of the playground, not of serious political analysis.” But I cannot eschew the word altogether. It is useful to have an umbrella term for the declarations about race and gender that are increasingly common among—though not exclusive to—the graduate classes. If wokeness is not ideal, neither are the alternatives. Progressive seems too charitable. Liberal and left-wing seem inaccurate, since many critics of wokeness identify with those traditions and see them as incompatible with it. Virtue signalling can be applied to a whole range of things many would not consider woke—from wearing poppies on Remembrance Sunday to “clapping for our NHS.” It also implies insincerity on the part of the signaller, which may be applicable in some cases but seems too uncharitable in general.
So, until someone suggests a better word, I will use wokeness, if only because it is commonly used, and I think I can recognise it when I see it. Besides, it is not the only word used lazily and insultingly on social media: see centrist, liberal, reactionary, tankie, and so on.
Perhaps one reason why wokeness is so difficult to critique with nuance is because its most frequently encountered manifestations—social media posts with hundreds of thousands of shares—are almost invariably cliched: simplistic stereotypes that lend themselves to easy repetition. Indeed, this might serve as a starting point for a definition of wokeness: conformity with certain cliches seen by their proponents as anti-racist, anti-misogynistic or generally progressive. This admittedly imperfect definition allows that the speaker of woke views may well be sincere, while recognising that her views defer to the maxims held by other members of her class. Certainly, it is preferable to the Cambridge Dictionary definition: “the state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” This definition, which echoes the original meaning of the word, implies that the woke person has correctly identified what form these societal problems take.
The certain cliches that characterise wokeness in my definition can be conceptualised as the kitsch of wokeness. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera argues that political movements are not so much defined by rational ideologies as by images, words and archetypes (kitsch) that, brought together, deny more complicated realities: “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Crucially, indulgence in kitsch brings with it the feeling that one is part of something greater—joining with others in being moved to happiness, sorrow or anger. These feelings come from the heart.
This theory resonated strongly with me this summer, when British Instagram was suddenly full of black squares intended to show solidarity with African-American victims of police violence. But whereas Kundera saw kitsch as excluding anything “which is essentially unacceptable in human existence,” the kitsch of wokeness draws attention to the unacceptable—racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.—across the western world. To modify some sentences from Kundera’s book: the kitsch of wokeness causes two tears to flow in succession. The first tear says—not, as in Kundera’s original text, “How nice to see children running on the grass,” but—How terrible to see someone being racist! The second tear says: How good to be angered, together with all mankind, by that someone being racist! It is that second tear that makes kitsch woke kitsch.
Of course, cliche has always been integral to the rhetoric of political justice. Indeed, we critics of wokeness have our own kitsch: the liberal arts professor indoctrinating her class; the snowflake student, etc. As Kundera says, kitsch is inescapable. But what is the defining kitsch of wokeness?
Most obviously, it takes the form of slogans: Black Lives Matter, Decolonise the Curriculum, Trans Women Are Women, Believe All Women and—though it has fallen out of fashion somewhat—Check Your Privilege. While such slogans are an easy target, the criticism seems justified by their ubiquity.
Let’s tackle one of the most common: Educate Yourself. One can hardly disagree with the idea that people should read widely and teach themselves things. The problem with the instruction as used by the woke is that it emphasises independent learning, but not independent thought. The activist, without wanting to put in the hard work of teaching themselves, wants others to come to agree with her beliefs. The slogan implies that education should lead to moral and ideological conformity—whereas the opposite is more often true. There is a large body of work on race and identity by politically and ethnically diverse authors out there, but the woke reading lists tend to repeat the same few recommended books by Kendi, Coates and Eddo-Lodge. The reader is to learn from these writers to attack particular systems and supposedly mainstream attitudes—but expresses dissent from the orthodoxy expressed by such authors themselves at her own peril. These books should not be automatically dismissed—we can learn things from stuff we disagree with—but, like anything else, they should be read with an open but critical mind.
The defining images of wokeness are the African-American murdered by the racist cop; privileged, tiresome, bigoted white people; the middle-aged Karen spouting TERF bile; the public monument to the slaveowner; the crowd storming down the street with raised fists to confront a complacent establishment.
The problem with these images is not that they are unimportant or necessarily devoid of truth. Indeed, in accordance with Kundera’s theory, they would probably not be as potent as they are if they had no basis in people’s experiences. Most of us watched the footage of George Floyd’s death with horror; most of us understand why people feel that black lives matter still needs to be said; most of us can recall hearing disparaging remarks about women and minorities. The problem is that these images are superimposed on everything else until the mere existence of things, facts and opinions that do not conform to them is deemed morally unacceptable. So David Shor was fired from a political consultancy firm for tweeting a link to an academic paper that connects violent protests with lower electoral turnout; Matthew Yglesias left Vox, unable to speak his mind without offending some of his younger colleagues; tributes to figures progressive in their own time but not by the standards of ours have been erased; and not a month goes by without students and academics signing an open letter denouncing someone or other for wrong-think.
The impenetrability of much academic verbiage is often commented upon, but wokeness has transformed such writings into retweetable, agreeable, simplistic messages—into kitsch. This is one reason why we should distinguish between wokeness and the critical theories that may have influenced it—about which this magazine’s editor Helen Pluckrose has co-authored a comprehensive book. When seventeen-year-olds post a black square on Instagram, they are directly echoing, not Foucault, but social media influencers and their friends. When a corporation with fuzzy dealings in China releases a statement saying that it stands against racial injustice, it is parroting both other companies and its graduate intake. In such cases, the collective pressure to do something, to do that one simple thing, has become overwhelming.
This is why I like Kundera’s approach so much. He suggests that, even when facing a power as stifling as the Soviet government, where sometimes the choice may be between playacting and no action at all, it is understandable if you do not want to join in with every march or shout every slogan. Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness is reluctant to join a demonstration against the occupation of Prague because, she feels that “behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions, lurks a more basic, pervasive evil … the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”
An individual might value her independence over the demand for uncompromising conformity—even when it comes from her own friends and allies, rather than from a totalitarian regime. Collective action can lead to positive change and some marches have juster aims than others—nonetheless, the line between a force for good and an oppressive force can feel terribly thin.
I am not sure my definition has stopped me strawmanning—or at least weak-manning—wokeness. Academics frequently complain that critics of wokeness spend more time obsessing on social media posts than considering the possibly more nuanced arguments found in journal articles or books. But when particular phrases are being shoved in your face every day, it seems reasonable to take issue with them. It is unfortunate that the word woke itself has become a cliche, but it is apt given that the things that make up wokeness are cliches, too. Indeed, wokeness might work better as a categorisation of the aesthetics and linguistics of social justice beliefs than of the beliefs themselves.
Yet whether anything critics say will be enough to stop the rise of wokeness is another matter. It fits rather neatly with Kundera’s definition of the best of all progressive ideas: “The one which is provocative enough that its supporters can feel proud of being different, but popular enough that the risk of isolation is precluded by cheering crowds confident of victory.”
12 comments
I love the references to Kundera. Very measured article, quotable but not kitsch!
Why is it necessary to criticize wokeness in good faith?
To criticize something it is necessary to have arguments and not to occupy some moral space. The criticism of wokeness is the criticism of immoral, aggressive and ruthless people, who do not care about, let alone apply to themselves any of these moral standards they think everyone else has to follow. The intoxication of public spaces with hypermoral Stalinist (or Maoist) struggle session is an exclusionary, discriminatory and anti-human enterprise.
Wokeness is the name of a set of ideologies which are strictly spoken an elite project to exercise domination and intimidation on every form of dissent. The goal is to crush contradiction and create conformity by building a terrorist and alienating exclusion of those who are already outsiders.
Wokeness is a form of conformist anger management directed at people who already are isolated. It is an instrument of mob violence to create minorities that can be targeted again and again and the good faith part is a form of being accomplice to the destruction of people who can’t defend themselves.
Thank you for that.
One of the hallmarks of our time—and indeed of how the Left largely controls, not just the “conversation”, but where it begins and ends, and how it is conducted—is how even those not explicitly on the Left always seem to be urging the Right toward greater civility, objectivity and respect—when those are some of the very things we’re fighting to conserve, while the Left regards them as archaic.
And then there was Donald Trump. One dimensional Kitsch all-the-way-down.
He was/is also a reverse King Midas – everything he touched was eviscerated of any and everything to do with Truth, Reality and The Beautiful too – especially The Beautiful
I think it was Julie Bindel who coined the term ‘Identifarians’ to describe the cult. I’ve always liked it.
If you want a less bad faith pejorative term how about ‘Identinarian left’?
I appreciate how this article points out some of the kitschy aspects of wokeness. I think the article’s insights can be usefully complemented by an awareness of why people participate in “woke culture” in the first place. From what I have seen, and speaking from personal experience, people are drawn to woke culture in part out of genuine concern for Social Justice but also because it provides an easy form of public morality for people who are otherwise just going to work, paying their bills, watching Netflix, and living an individualistic kind of life. If a person isn’t already involved in church, charity, volunteering, neighborhood service, local communities, etc., then marching in a protest or posting on social media can feel like “doing something”, even if that something doesn’t lead to concrete, measurable change. And if a person feels like they are doing something helpful by amplifying whatever message BLM or some other activist organization tells them to amplify, then they are greatly unlikely to be interested in nuanced conversation around this issue — they will just interpret nuanced conversation as debate. Again, I’m suggesting the excesses of wokeism come about because participating in this culture is an easy way for an otherwise publicly disengaged person to feel that they are contributing something positive to the larger society.
So the biggest problem with wokeism (on the whole) is its lack of seriousness. And paradoxically the easiest way to fix this problem is for people to actually get engaged in trying to make concrete changes in the world on the basis of their woke moral impulses. As soon as a person actually sits down and tries to figure out how they are going to help bring about real change, they will run into the full complexity of the problems they are trying to solve. That’s how I see woke culture evolving in the coming years: like incoming sea water breaking upon rocks on the shore, once the impulse towards Social Justice meets with the complex realities of how society is actually structured, those impulses will break apart different parts of our society while also ultimately falling away. Let’s hope we can all rise to the challenge and task of helping this process proceed smoothly, peacably, and constructively.
A lot of what you say resonates with what I’ve observed. Many of my ‘woke’ friends would be pretty much apolitical without it. But social media has made political engagement of a simplistic sort easy and provides a sense of purpose and even excitement as one can clash with others and ‘win’ (by whatever definition of winning works). Of course a similar description could be made for any of the online caricatures of ideology that now inhabit the ether.
Conversely those who work at the front lines of difficult issues are often far more conciliatory because they know that conflict tends to just make others dig in further. Interestingly I suspect many of them now engage in a kind of compartmentalization in which they use the aggressive language of clictivists online but then abandon it in face-to-face civic work.
Wokeness is nothing more than twenty-first century shamanism: a cult that seeks to control the levers of power by any means possible. It started off using soft-power techniques, but is now morphing into hard power. Notice the trend toward labelling non-conformists as right-wing supremacists. This isn’t mere hyperbole. At the moment, it’s being purposefully misapplied in order to scare people to go along with it. Later, to provide a convenient enemy to unleash their violence upon.
Wokism is far worse than we ever could have imagined. I quote at length an essay by James Lindsay, who with Helen Pluckrose coined the term “grievance studies” since this site deletes comments with external links. I encourage you to read it in its entirety by searching for the title “No, the woke won’t debate you. Here’s why”.
Here, the “master’s tools” are explicitly named by Bailey as including soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about) and can easily be extended to science, reason, and rationality, and thus also to conversation and debate. The “master’s house” is the “organizational schemata” laid out by Kristie Dotson as the prevailing knowing system. Her claim is that these tools—essentially all of the liberal ones—cannot dismantle liberal societies from within, which is their goal, because they are the very tools that build and keep building it.
Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.
The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.
Their analysis would insist that their methods aren’t weak; it’s that the dominant system treats them unfairly. By being forced to participate in the dominant system, they therefore believe, they’re being cheated of the full force of their cause. To them, if we set the legitimization of the system part aside, to engage in scholarly conversation or debate is like a boxer stepping into an MMA match in which kicks, punches, throwing, and grappling are all on the table for the MMA fighter whereas gloved punches are the only thing the boxer is allowed to use, only far worse.
Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.
Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.
Some good neutral terms are: identitarian left, left-modernism, liberal-fundamentalism.
I agree that calling them ‘progressives’ gives them far too much implicit moral credit; same with ‘radicals’ – wokeism is a deeply conformist ideology, since it trades on relative social status and perceived moral virtue. Plus, because it is blind to progress, it undoes progress already made e.g. by re-racialising a society that was otherwise moving closer to colour-blindness.
It would be great if more people could start describing the woke as they actually are: tribal, reactionary conformists.
Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam used the term “regressive leftist” to describe the woke. I find it apt.
Surely that would be ‘left post-modernist’?