Table of Contents
Introduction
Evolving Post
This post has been amended in 2023 and 2024, after it was first published.
Woke
The Oxford English Dictionary entry for “woke” is: “Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. … Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.” The Urban Dictionary says: “Being woke means being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice).” “Woke” does not connote “enlightened” in the religious sense or in the sense of the age of Enlightenment in European intellectual history. The Wikipedia entry suggests a sense of membership in a historically oppressed group. The entry “Woke” emphasizes:
Woke is an English adjective meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination” that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
Wikipedia, January 2023, Woke
The term “Woke” connoted an ideological position in the American political “culture war” in the early 21st century. It came to refer to people who hold left-wing views on the left-right ideological spectrum, in the context of European and American history.
An October 2020 article in Vox “A history of “wokeness” subtitled “Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war” discusses the use of “woke” as American Black vernacular, the appropriation of word by progressive intellectuals, concern that progressives are using it as a form of performative activism, cynical and sarcastic uses of the word by conservatives, and ironic uses of the word.
John Gray, a scholar of the history of liberalism, discussed cancel culture in universities in an essay in 2018. Gray noted that cancel culture was inconsistent with standard or classical liberal values, including the idea of freedom of speech. He suggested that modern “progressive” ideas, while not socialist or Marxist, varied from classical liberalism and from economic neo-liberalism. He adopted the term hyper-liberal. The essay has been paywalled by the publisher. I will quote:
… In the past higher education was avowedly shaped by an ideal of unfettered inquiry. Varieties of social democrats and conservatives, liberals and Marxists taught and researched alongside scholars with no strong political views. Academic disciplines cherished their orthodoxies, and dissenters could face difficulties in being heard. But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to silence them or terminate their careers. An inquisitorial culture had not yet taken over.
… Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world. If a regime of censorship prevails in universities, it is because they have become vehicles for this project.
John Gray, The problem of hyper-liberalism, Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 2018. Emphasis added.
Gray’s article suggested that “cancel culture” was a practice of hyper-liberals. He was critical of the failure of hyper-liberals to accept the “liberal” values of tolerance for diverse opinions and respect for freedom of speech. Gray seemed to agree with conservative or right-wing writers who later attack “cancel culture” and “identity politics” as left-wing nonsense. This view ignored the facts that:
- technology (internet, social media) allowed some cultural practices to flourish;
- social cancellation is practiced by people who are not left-wing, progressive, hyper-liberal, social justice warriors”; and
- racist white nationalists, in the early 21st century, practiced the politics of their discontent and disadvantages, and sought to cancel views they rejected.
Gray refined his discussion of hyper-liberalism in The New Leviathans (2023) at p. 37:
The hyper-liberal project is to emancipate human beings from identities that have been inherited from the past. Human beings must be free to make themselves whatever they wish.
Gray compares 21st century hyper-liberalism to nihilism and other 19th century Russian revolutionary movements, and to medieval millenarian religious movements. He suggests that the hyper-liberal project of “self-creation” involves a pastiche of worn-out ideas.
The American writer Ross Douthat suggested that “woke” marks a change to left wing “progressive” or modern values in American politics, and the understanding of liberalism:
Can it be usefully defined? Is it just a right-wing pejorative? Is there any universally accepted label for what it’s trying to describe? The answers are yes, sometimes and unfortunately no. Of course, there is something real to be described: The revolution inside American liberalism is a crucial ideological transformation of our time.
Ross Douthat, What it Means to Woke, New York Times, March 18, 2023
The writer Ian Buruma noted:
… the word itself … has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.
Ian Buruma, Doing the Work, Harper’s Magazine, July 2023 (gated)
The writer Yascha Mounk has written about an “identity synthesis” in articles and in the book The Identity Trap (2023). The “identity synthesis” theory, In summary, is that
- political ideas synthesized into an antiliberal, censorious, segregationist dogma on college campuses and online in the early 2000s;
- this “ideology” went mainstream in the mid-2010s, especially in medicine and education, where institutions began to adopt theoretical frameworks under which it was believed the best way to achieve equity for students and patients was not to treat everyone equally, but to offer “preferential treatment” and exclusionary experiences to members of marginalized groups.
Demographic?
Social Sciences
Sociologists consider people in groups by age in generations to discuss changes in culture or in American culture by recognizing the size and complexity of the human population, that people have lived at different times and in different places, and the population can be divided in many ways.
Some of the social sciences study cultures, subcultures and counter-cultures. Other disciplines with consider groups of individuals by some common features include genetics, language, and biology. Some social sciences discuss social generation (birth cohort), or generational cohort. The use of generational generalities by is common, but has been abandoned by some writers. The Australian economist and writer John Quiggan:
Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.
John Quiggin, “Millenial Means Nothing” NY Times (Opinion) March 6, 2018; “Pew Quits the Generation Game”, Crooked Timber June 6, 2023
Woke is used, sometimes, to describe the social, ethical and political values – in the early 2020s – of members of the younger social generation (birth cohorts), or generational cohorts: millennial or Gen Z persons. According to the consensus of sociology, “woke” is not a demographic term that can be applied to a generational cohort. Nor does it refer to educational credentials. Sociologists have theorized that a social generation may tend to be against the values of older cohorts, or transgressive.
Sociology is one of the “social sciences” taught in post secondary institutions in the U.S.A. The social sciences have a foundational belief that human beings have common needs, emotional tendencies, attitudes, interests and beliefs. Some of the social sciences attempt to identify and measure the aggregated effects of billions of individual decisions and events. The social sciences often base theories on facts determined by what people say, how they use resources and how they respond to surveys rather than to the physiology of human beings and physical facts about their environments and products.
Pre-modern philosophers in the rationalist traditions of the European Age of Enlightenment thought that scientific ways of understanding were superior to philosophy, viewed as arguments about words, as ways of explaining both:
- physical matter and energy and
- humans and society.
They suggested that scientific study of facts would produce greater understanding of the subjects. Several of the areas have become academic disciplines known collectively as “social sciences”, or interdisciplinary study:
- how humans, including young humans, perceived reality and thought (psychology),
- how society worked (sociology, and some sub-fields of anthropology),
- how humans lived in the time before written history, and how different groups of people have different beliefs and social practices than other groups (some sub-fields of anthropology),
- how people managed property, labour and money (economics),
- how people are governed (political science), and
- how ideas worked in society (ideology and communication science).
It was an assumption about progress in the social sciences. Some social scientists have identified ways of proving facts about some aspects of social behaviour.
Ideology did not become an academic discipline. The term is used to identify some topics and courses in philosophy, sociology, and political science. The Canadian edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defined the word:
Ideology | noun| a system of ideas or way of thinking, usually relating to politics or society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, esp. one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events.
Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2d. ed. 2004)
It has become a term for theories about how the power and wealth arise or are generated in societies.
Ideology in modern classifications of academic specialties mainly involves:
- the history of theories,
- arguments about whether humans act in the way that theories say they do,
- whether theories may can explain what influence ideas had on what people did
- mass communications.
The explanation of ideas leads to the psychological, social and political dimensions of communication and persuasion. The questions of how ideas are spread and affect behaviour have not been answered.
The meaning varies slightly in context. Nationalism, Imperialism, Fascism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Socialism, Communism. and anarchism influenced societies and governments in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Karl Marx, the 19th century German philosopher, wrote an influential “critique” of ideology.
Technology and Mass Communication
Joseph Heath made a point about cancel culture in an article posted to his blog on the Substack platform, In Due Course (it is not paywalled in 2024; Substack will generate pop-ups inviting readers to subscribe or install Substack software – these can be ignored):
… the origins of cancel culture are neither political nor cultural. Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media. This is reflected in the fact that its basic features (manifest in … cancellation practices) have been observed in countries all over the world and have been mobilized by individuals with a wide range of different political orientations.
In the United States, criticism of cancel culture has been deeply interwoven with controversies over “woke” politics, but as many commentators have noted, the internal dynamics of the Republican party exhibit many of the same characteristics. Fear of being labelled a RINO or cuck has had a disciplining effect on speech among conservatives that closely resembles the tyranny of speech codes on the left. So there is nothing intrinsically left-wing or woke about cancel culture. Furthermore, it is not a consequence of political polarization in the U.S., since cancellation has become an enormous issue in China as well, in this case with nationalist mobs policing online speech for minor slights, then extracting groveling confessions and apologies from celebrities.
….
… social media have dramatically expanded the power to individuals to recruit third parties to conflict. Human beings are distinctive in a variety of different ways, but one of the most important is that otherwise uninvolved third parties will often intervene in conflicts that erupt between strangers. In some cases this involves enforcement of the normative order.
Joseph Heath “A simple theory of cancel culture”, December 23, 2023
Joseph Heath also made good points about identity politics:
… having difficulty getting too worked up about the current debates over identity politics … because I’ve been through this once already. I’ve seen the movie, I know how it ends.
… I have a living memory of the 1990s. In fact, I’ve had the same job since the ‘90s, and I can remember the zeal with which people fought over the exact same ideas, often in the exact same formulations. I derive grim amusement from young people pointing to some cultural product of the late ‘90s, like Maxim magazine, and saying “OMG they were so sexist,” or complaining that some Seinfeld joke is “problematic.” They don’t realize that these cultural products were successful because they were part of a backlash against the excessive political correctness of the previous decade.
I can recall being extremely puzzled the first time that I heard a millennial making a big deal about “intersectionality.” What I found strange was that she was treating it as though it were a new revelation – as though it had not occurred to anyone previously that, for example, Black women might be subject to certain tribulations that other women, and other Blacks, were spared.
….
The other thing that I can remember from back in the ‘90s is a lot of people arguing against identity politics, for pretty much the exact same reasons that people argue against it today.
….
… identity politics can most fruitfully be compared to nationalism. It is not so much a set of ideas as a sociopolitical strategy. It is, first and foremost, a way of mobilizing people to engage in collective action, and secondarily, a way of addressing some of the dilemmas around identity and meaning that arise in modern societies. This explains both its emotional appeal and its resistance to rational refutation.
The central feature shared by nationalism and identity politics is that they both involve activation of the powerful human psychological propensity referred to as “groupishness” (or less compactly, as the urge to divide the social world up into in-group and out-group members). The primary practical consequence of such activation is that it generates increased solidarity within the in-group (and thus improved capacity for collective action) combined with hostility (diminished cooperativeness, etc.) toward the out-group.
….
The strategic calculation underlying identity politics … is … to combat oppression by promoting more intense solidarity among those who are subject to it, in order to facilitate collective action aimed at resisting it. In other words, the strategy goes beyond consciousness-raising about the fact of oppression; it is aimed at encouraging members of oppressed groups to think of themselves as members of a distinct group, and thus to make this membership part of their identity.
….
My suggestion instead would be that we treat [identity politics] the same way that most of us have learned to treat nationalism, which is to regard it as 1. essentially unprincipled, 2. psychologically obdurate, 3. instrumentally useful, with 4. potentially negative side-effects that need to be actively sublimated. In the case of identity politics, what we need right now is greater focus on 4. Specifically, progressives need to worry a great deal more about the possibility that growing exophobia in Western societies constitutes a strategic failure of the approach they have adopted to advance the cause of social justice.
Joseph Heath, “The futility of arguing against identity politics”, November 25, 2023, In Due Course
Millennials and Gen Z. are different from previous generations; the young generations are versed in social media as a way of communication, among other experience in life in society. There are differences within social generations. All millennials have dealt with woke capitalism and cancel culture as existential facts. Millennials, GenZ members and students share some generational beliefs, values, assumptions, attitudes and language about:
- people, psychology and sociology, and
- about ambition, age,
Even while they are apart on the left-right ideological spectrum), Millennials, GenZ members share some experience, language, beliefs, and values:
- the use of social media as a medium of communication,
- the use of business jargon,
- beliefs that markets, individualism and consumerism are unchangeable and irresistible forces of nature,
Some millennials are pro-business, individualist, neo-liberal, libertarian and right-wing. Woke capitalism tries to avoid alienating any market segment, and gives the impression that business and persons in business endorse or embrace woke ideas.
In the early decades of the 2000s many millennials, members of Gen Z and university students were reflexively and passionately Woke. Those young Woke are a subset of the age and occupational groups of millennials, Gen Z and students. Woke ideology expressed the social and economic frustrations of millennials, Gen Z and students with their access to resources, opportunities, power and status the same way that the ideologies of the ’60s expressed the frustrations of boomers at that time. The Woke can be visible in the way that hippies and other parts of the “counterculture” were visible in the 1960s.
Interdisciplinary Theories
The interdisciplinary political scientist Peter Turchin observes that the U.S.A, where elites control politics to increase their wealth, educates young people and gives them elite status, has a problem with equality and political governance:
… our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.
Peter Turchin, “America’s Dysfuntion has Two Main Causes”, The Atlantic, June 2, 2023
Political Theories
The Left
The left-right spectrum is based on how representatives were seated in the French National Assembly in 1789, after the French Revolution. “Left” in European politics was against established religion and government by a hereditary aristocracy. The “Left” has referred to liberal, socialist and communist parties.
Liberal connotes generosity, faith in humanity, modernism, or progressive ideas. Liberal refers to a political idea emphasizing freedom from something – aristocratic government, monopoly, tradition, restraint. It was an idea or ideology of the left in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America. It is regarded in modern times as a centrist or conservative idea. The United States of America developed liberty as a right of individuals to be free from coercion, including some kinds of economic and existential coercion. This approach to liberal principles can be called libertarian. Americans largely accepted laissez-faire economic principles in the gilded age at the end of the 19th century.
The European Left of the middle decades of the 20th century was more socialist and communist than liberal. Marxist parties were popular in Europe. Marxist ideas were part or the European academy across Eastern and Western Europe. The European Left respected the philosophy, sociology and economics of Karl Marx including the idea that members of the working class were not aware of the cause of their oppression because of False consciousness. The idea evolved into the Marxist critique of ideology. Wikipedia notes that Marx used the term critique as part of the language of intellectual discourse in the German tradition, in the 19th century:
Rather than a synonym for criticism, “critique” comes from Immanuel Kant’s usage of the term, which meant an investigation into the structures under which we live, think, and act. A critic of ideology, in this sense, is not merely one who expresses disagreement or disapproval, but who is able to bring to light the belief’s true conditions of possible existence. Because conditions are constantly changing, showing a belief’s existence to be built on mere conditions implicitly shows that they are not eternal, natural, or organic, but are instead historical, contingent, and therefore changeable.
The Marxist critique of ideology evolved into a staple of modern critical theory (discussed below), a key theory in modern/new left thinking:
The critique of ideology is a concept used in critical theory, literary studies, and cultural studies. It focuses on analyzing the ideology found in cultural texts, whether those texts be works of popular culture or high culture, philosophy or TV advertisements. These ideologies can be expressed implicitly or explicitly. The focus is on analyzing and demonstrating the underlying ideological assumptions of the texts and then criticizing the attitude of these works. An important part of ideology critique has to do with “looking suspiciously at works of art and debunking them as tools of oppression”
Wikipedia, “Critique of Ideology”.
Liberals and Progressives
For decades in the 20th century Americans maintaining nationalist positions avoided the term “left”, and tended to self-describe as patriotic. Many were hesitant to be liberal, which signaled support for business, and identified as progressives on political, social and ethical issues.
The acceptance of laissez-faire liberalism declined as more Americans supported New Deal policies, and Cold War Liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s. The American Left, in the New Deal order, put more faith in government to protect the freedom and living standards of Americans. Cold-war liberalism was an American attempt to reconcile:
- the founding myth that the United States of America is a beacon of democracy with a mission to the world to
- the pursuit of money and power in the world by Americans.
Cold war liberalism promoted the idea that a person could be a good person as a citizen of a state that acted in the interest of plutocrats and used national power for business goals:
This distinct body of liberal thought says that freedom comes first, that the enemies of liberty are the first priority to confront and contain in a dangerous world, and that demanding anything more from liberalism is likely to lead to tyranny.
Samuel Moyn, Liberalism in Mourning, Boston Review. August 10, 2023 (Extract from Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times)
The American economy was strong in the decades after World War II. Its internal and international politics were anti-communist. The American right wanted government to protect property rights. Business interests and libertarian theorists wanted to avoid government restrictions on business and markets.
Many American followed their interests while also practicing hard work and seeking good jobs and self-advancement.
American historians, for example Gary Gerstle, maintain that the New Deal was the basis of a political order . In 1989 he co-edited the book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, on the writing of American political history. He followed up in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, (2022, Oxford University Press). In the 2022 book, he explained:
… “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond … the election cycles. In the last 100 years, America has had two political orders: the New deal order that arose in the 1930s and 1940s … and fell in the 1970s, and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s …
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, (2022, Oxford University Press), p. 3
The Counterculture
The 1960s Counterculture was a real aggregation of changes in behaviour by billions of people in millions of places in thousands of ways . It has been described as positive change in culture, by persons with a liberal, neo-liberal, progressive, socialist or modern leftist view of society, culture and history. The term Counterculture was used by the historian Theodore Roszak in the title of his 1969 book The Making of the Counterculture. Roszak discussed the ideas of 1960s New Left writers in the book. He later wrote, in a review of an anthology of essays:
When I coined the term “counterculture” in 1968, I had a precise but far- too-narrow definition in mind. I meant the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community — the military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it.
….
… it was among women and various embattled minorities that the enduring political ideals of the period were forged: participatory democracy, consciousness raising, communitarian sharing and open institutions that permitted personal authenticity.
….
… chapter on communes, a … study of several efforts to disaffiliate from the dominant culture. Building an alternative social order based on “anarchy, pacifism, voluntary poverty, sexual freedom, rural isolation, psychedelics and art” was more than a few communities could achieve for the long haul, especially those that lacked the cohesiveness of a religious tradition.
Of course, history isn’t made by decades on the calendar. It is made by people, usually creative minorities who are improvising madly in behalf of ideals not yet fully understood. When commentators look back with cynicism on the countercultural ’60s, I wonder what historical baseline they are invoking as a criterion for principled politics and cultural creativity.
Theodore Roszak, When the Counterculture Counted, December 2001
Roszak’s book was popular. The lawyer and legal academic Charles A. Reich explored the ideas in his 1970 book, The Greening of America. An extract from the book was published in the magazine, The New Yorker. The book was a bestseller at the time. Roszak and Reich were academics in the 1960s, sympathetic to the values of the 1960s’ American New Left
The libertarian writer Virginia Postel presented the counterculture as less consequential and less rebellious than Roszak and Reich:
Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’. The counterculture took many forms, from hippie communes to New Left demands for ‘participatory democracy’. It included anti-war protests and calls for women’s liberation, along with plenty of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Politically and culturally, the counterculture repudiated the reigning notions of progress. It was anti-modernist.
‘In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man’, wrote Roszak. ‘Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities – political, economic, cultural – transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts’. Technocrats might consider themselves benevolent forces, extending prosperity to the masses, he argued, but they exercised ‘totalitarian control’.
The counterculture rejected claims to expertise, whether by city planners, industrial corporations, research scientists, or mainstream medicine. It longed for a society anyone could understand. It decried specialization. Even the counterculture’s technophilic version, represented by Stewart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog, sought individual ‘access to tools’. The personal computer, not the corporate mainframe, embodied its idea of progress.
The counterculture’s antagonism to big business and scientific expertise largely explains why ecological consciousness took an anti-Promethean turn. Solving discrete environmental problems means further empowering people with specialized knowledge. Embracing spiritual practices, celebrating the wilderness, demanding vegetables raised without pesticides, and protesting nuclear power are things anyone can do. The anti-Promethean turn encouraged people to trust their instincts: to protect what they treasured and ban what they feared, regardless of what experts said.
Virginia Postrel, The World of Tomorrow , December 2024, Works in Progress (magazine)
Members of the counterculture were against the Vietnam war, and had other New Left political positions. However many American boomers, during the ’60s, were:
- conservative, career-oriented, patriotic, and in favour of US involvement in the Vietnam War, or
- blended conservative or neo-liberal on some issues with liberal views on freedoms to take drugs or possess firearms, act freaky and explore lifestyles.
The members of the New Left who were young in the 1960s have aged, changed, or died. The Left has changed, and the language and methods have changed.
Critical Theory
Critical theory, in philosophy and ideology, refers to:
… a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” … refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of
furthering emancipation. … influential figures of the first generation of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – and the leading figure of the second generation, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929).
In a broader sense, there are many different strands of critical
theory that have emerged as forms of reflective engagement with the emancipatory goals of various social and political movements, such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Critical theory (Frankfurt School)”, December 2023
Critical theory was developed out of Marxist theories by Frankfurt school theorists in the middle of the 20th century. The 1947 work, Dialectic of Enlightenment is a core text. A Dialectic as understood by the authors was a Hegelian dialectic. The Frankfurt school, like Karl Marx and many 19th and 20th century writers, used Hegel’s analysis. The Frankfurt school criticized both Marxist and 20th century liberal thought as ways of describing society and history in the real world.
Critical theory was the basis of approaches to humanities and social philosophy that attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures:
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture to reveal and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Wikipedia, November 2022, Critical Theory
The Frankfurt school reframed the idea as a structural feature of the cultural hegemony of the capitalist class, and as a cultural metanarrative. On this basis, the members of the working class who believed in the values of the ruling classes were both deceived by a story, and oppressed. Later Continental philosophers, political scientists, social scientists and literary theorists developed Critical Theory. Critical theory was used to attack theories accepted by many older thinkers, and accepted widely.
The Paradox of Tolerance – that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance – proposed by Karl Popper in 1945 as criticized by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance Marcuse argued that tolerance has become a means of repression. He argued that “pure tolerance” should be replaced with “liberating tolerance,” which, he states, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
Marcuse’s argument proceeded from the assumption that the culture industry, was aligned with “the right,” not because of the political sympathies of those who worked in the industry, but because it ideologically reproduced capitalist relations. The culture industry, from this perspective, cannot challenge the dominant forces of society because it is itself one of those forces. Hence, from Marcuse’s point of view, it is unimaginable that media and technology corporations could under be the vanguard of “liberating tolerance.”
African, Caribbean and South American writers became influential with European thinkers and with writers addressing decoloniality, and “civil rights” and racial issues in the USA. For instance:
Critical theory questioned both Capitalist and Marxist theories. It became a means of attacking everything as a statement explaining an alleged or perceived hegemony.
Critical theory is skeptical of many stories told as knowledge. Critical theory has been used to criticize imperialism and colonialism, which has led to claims that “history must fall” and that monuments to historical figures erected in previous generations must fall. The students of the hard sciences mock postmodernist and students of critical theory who dispute physical facts proved by measurement and observation. The Sokal Hoax was a great prank.
Literary Criticism
Literary criticism is an academic discipline, one of the humanities. Work in the humanities is largely based on recorded text. It was established to study literature to understand it and assess the quality of works of literature. Faced with mass culture, mass reproduction of art, and capitalism, the idea of identifying quality became contentious. The academic field became concerned with understanding:
- what a writer meant when a work was written,
- the writer’s state of mind, mental health status, relationships, politics and sexuality,
- political issues that a writer might be have had opinions on.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, literary criticism commonly discussed history, psychology, sociology and politics. as well as taste and aesthetics. The historical, Modernist, and New Criticism schools of literary theory) discussed literature as myth, drawing on ideas from anthropology and psychology including the theories of James George Frazer, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Campbell. Northrup Frye was an influential literary critic, well regarded until the 1970s:
Frye, in his magnum opus, Anatomy of Criticism, had conceived
of myth, archetype, ritual, and symbol as forming a cathedral-like
structure in which every literary work finds its place, much as every
redeemed soul finds its place in the mystical rose at the end of Dante’s Commedia. By linking this symbol in Virgil to that symbol in Percy Shelley, this echo of ancient ritual in Shakespeare to another one in George Eliot, Frye sought to create a taxonomy of the literary imagination—a project satisfying to the tidy-minded and the spiritually hungry alike.
Alan Jacobs, Yesterday’s Men, Harper’s Magazine, July 2024 (gated)
The academic consensus changed; literary criticism changed;reading habits, and literary tasted changed. Postmodern literary theory, informed by critical theory, feminist theory, and queer studies regards any language as a narrative that may communicate ideas about culture, society and politics, and influence or propagandize or indoctrinate:
Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by the New Critics, also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the “rise” of theory, have declined. Many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.
Some critics work largely with texts, and theory. Others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great. Many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women’s literature, as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature
Wikipedia, October, 2022, Literary Criticism
University education in the humanities is faltering in the USA. Students in American Universities take courses in business, professional education, science, and engineering according to the reports of the US National Center for Education Statistics. Some of the social sciences are popular. Explanations:
For many decades, there has been a growing public perception that a humanities education inadequately prepares graduates for employment. The common belief is that graduates from such programs face underemployment and incomes too low for a humanities education to be worth the investment.
Wikipedia, The Humanities #Education & Employment, September, 2022
The usual suspects—student debt, postmodern relativism, vanishing jobs—are once again being trotted out. But the data suggest something far more interesting may be at work. The plunge seems not to reflect a sudden decline of interest in the humanities, or any sharp drop in the actual career prospects of humanities majors. Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market. …
The Atlantic, Benjamin Schmidt. August 23, 2018, The Humanities are in Crisis
The New Left – Europe & UK
The European New Left the 1960s and 70s, was anti-American, and largely socialist:
- Some, like the Old Left of the 19th and early 20th centuries, remained firmly Marxist-Leninist, or Stalinist, or Trotskyist about politics, economics, history and metaphysics;
- Some followed the modified Marxisms or new movements and ideas of:
- Adorno and the Frankfort school,
- Gramsci,
- Fanon, or
- Marcuse;
- Some were part of the self-described New Left movements;
- Some adopted new ideas about social structure and critical theory.
The American Left encountered European Left beliefs from immigrants, from travelers, from visiting scholars and from Americans who studied European philosophy and social science. Marcuse’s view of tolerance was popular with the American New Left. It can be regarded as foundational to the modern Woke position, having laid the groundwork for the censorious leftism that arose in academia and has become more influential in the broader culture.
The New Left in European, English and American institutions became students and teachers of European critical theory. This was not a uniform or universal process. One instance: the English historian E.P. Thompson was a member of the Communist Party in Britain who left the party in the 1950s. He remained a Marxist who used Marxist ideas about class in his books about about social history including his books about the English Working Class. He disagreed with ideas of the French writer Louis Althuser, and feuded with the writers of the English publication New Left Review, on the use of the European critical theory of post-structuralism in writing history.
Politically, many Americans turned against government over racial segregation and other racial issues, Vietnam, war, oil prices, consumer protection, and environmental issues. Some supported the New Left politics of the American Left, as it was in the 1960s and 70s.
The American New Left, like the “old” American Left in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, was a term for millions of individuals. Some had liberal beliefs in the American republic, democracy and progress. Some were interested in advancing the interests of workers in better wages and working conditions against business. Some believed that society was divided into classes. Some believed in socialism, Marxism or anarchism. Some had versions of those ideologies Some had religious views. Religious groups had formed communal organizations for centuries, and continued in the era of the New Left .
Part of the new Left was based on concerns that government institutions failed to properly protect the public by failing to recognize and enforce certain rights and interests. Part of the New Left was inclined to explore ideas about how a society could function without a government with the power to punish and compel. Critics of government on the Left developed new positions that weakened government and allowed business interest to avoid regulation or build monopolies.
In the first decades of the 21st century, progressive millennials were involved in the anti-globalization movement against global capitalist values as recently as the Occupy Wall Street protests. Those protests followed a New Left version of populism. Among other things, they valorized consensus-based decisions in general assemblies. Other leftist or progressive groups reacted to the domination of politics by business interests and the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies by “liberal democratic” governments. Later in the early 21st century, the reaction against conservative movements and national populist movements such as the American MAGA movement led to the idea of an anti-fascist resistance. Advocates of this approach:
- argued that the American civil rights movement had been prepared for armed resistance.
- took the militant view of the resistance to the Trump administration and to American government policies that privileged capital and oppressed youth and students was justified.
Progressive writers attempt to reconcile woke to socialist principles. Malcolm Harris, the author of a collection of essays called Shit is All Fucked Up and Bullshit (2020). He identifies himself as a Marxist. He criticizes “Duplo” Marxists:
Cards on the table: I’m a Marxist. Hi. I believe taking on that label includes a certain amount of respect for the Duplo [i.e. large block, as opposed to small – e.g. – Lego blocks] Marxist story, but that’s not how I learned Marxism … .
To go beyond Duplo Marxism is to see that society isn’t just composed of two blocks, that the owner/wage-laborer relation is not the sole class division. Instead, each of those two blocks are composed of smaller blocks, not individuals, but other class relations. Lego Marxism can handle multiple variables, multiple class relations that are going on at the same time — intersecting even. You could take apart the big blocks and recompose them according to a different social division and still be doing important, useful materialism. …
…. what really inspired me was an essay from the late-70s by French women’s liberation theorist Christine Delphy called “A Materialist Feminism is possible.”…
Delphy’s answer is more direct: Women are exploited by men. There is the capitalist mode of production and there is also a concurrent and interrelated “domestic” or “patriarchal” mode of production, which benefits men (as a class) and exploits women (as a class). She is also careful to note that there are some men exploited by the domestic mode as well, pointing out specifically 307,000 French men who work unwaged on family farms and in family businesses. …
Malcolm Harris, July 2016, Lego Marx, published in Medium online
Social Justice Culture
A Culture
Woke has been called “Social Justice Culture” to indicate a belief system which can be a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. This system promises self-actualization, like religion, with personal experiences and personal truth as the ultimate guide for fulfilling one’s potential. Many people who can be identified as “Spiritual but not religious”, and/or as members of alternative religious groups (e.g. Wiccan, Satanic, Jedi, New Age) may be woke. The core belief is:
… racism, sexism, & other forms of bigotry & injustice must be struck down at all costs in order to achieve a better, fairer world …
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites, (2020)
The British political scientist Matthew Goodwin described woke as:
… “Left Modernism”, or “radical progressivism”, is a pseudo-religious belief system organized around the sacralization of racial, sexual & gender minorities, which prioritises subjectivity/lived experience over empirical evidence.
Twitter, November 9, 2021; Twitter, July 17, 2022
Woke persons may be social justice warriors or hold one or more of the sets of belief held by members of some of the left ideologies. It is useful to refer to social justice leftists. A social justice leftist may hold a liberal, progressive, feminist, anti-racist, antifa, socialist, or hold other views.
In December 2022 James O’Malley suggested 6 markers of “wokeness”, including these:
… wokeness does represent a new and distinct set of political ideas, that are anchored by different values and priorities to what would traditionally be characterised as left-leaning, liberal and progressive.
….
What characteristics lie at the heart of this new woke ideology? What makes it different to the small-l liberal political consensus that existed before? How can we decide whether something is deserving of the label “woke” or not? These are my suggestions for The Woke Test. If a thing shares some of these characteristics, then I think it is accurate to label it “woke”
….
[1] “Woke” emphasises identitarian deference
The term “identitarian deference” was coined by the writer Matt Bruenig in 2013 to describe how “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals, especially on topics relevant to those individuals’ oppression”.
….
… under the new “woke” norms, data alone is not seen as enough – instead, arguments are considered the most compelling when they are made by someone who shares an identity characteristic relevant to the issue at hand.
….
[6] “Woke” prioritises right-side norms over accuracy norms
One essay I keep coming back to is Jesse Singal’s piece on “right-side” norms vs “accuracy” norms, which he uses to explain why arguments on the internet are so toxic. His argument goes that members of different communities follow different rules to remain in good standing with their peers. For example, in some communities, to maintain good standing, it is important to make sure what you say is accurate. A journalist will lose status for inaccurate reporting, say, or a scientist will lose status if they do not accurately publish the results of an experiment.
But other communities may evolve different norms. For example, in a community of political activists or football fans, it may be more important to be on the “right side” of a debate: There is the risk of a social penalty that makes it much harder to concede that the other side made a good point, or the referee’s decision to award the other team a penalty was correct, because it will invite the ire of your friends and colleagues.
Where “woke” vs “non-woke” maps on to this … “woke” communities often value being on “the right side” over accuracy
James O’Malley, Odds and Ends of History, December 14, 2022, “Woke” is a new ideology and its proponents should admit it Substack (a paywalled internet publication, accessible in this instance)
Less woke Americans and Europeans accepted the neo-classial or neo-liberal economics that American business demanded was true, or scientifically explained existential facts about society, money and resources.
Religion; and Virtue Signaling
Writers, including Ian Buruma, have noted similarities between the Woke phenomenon and Protestant religious theology and practices (as they had been understood by the early 20th century sociologists like Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism :
The ritual of public avowals began in Europe with the Reformation. Whereas Jews and Catholics are ceremonially initiated into their religious communities as young children, many Protestants, such as the Anabaptists, declare their faith before their brethren as adults, sometimes in so-called conversion narratives. The idea of public attestation was especially important to Pietism, a seventeenth-century offshoot of Lutheranism. Pietism, in turn, had a great influence on many Christian sects, including the New England Puritans. Puritan churches, as the historian Edmund S. Morgan put it, ensured “the presence of faith in their members by a screening process that included narratives of religious experiences.”
….
Protestants have to find their own way to God’s blessing, through self-examination, public testimony, and the performance of actions that demonstrate impeccable virtue. This has to be a constant process. In his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber observed that the Protestant ideal is more demanding than the Catholic aim of gradually accumulating individual good deeds to one’s credit. Sins are not forgiven in rituals of private atonement—cleaning the slate, as it were, for one to sin and be absolved. Rather, salvation lies in “a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned.” God helps those who help themselves. For the chosen, the signaling of virtue can never stop. [Emphasis added]
For Weber, it was the “spirit of hard work” that characterized those striving to meet the Protestant goal of ethical perfection. This could be interpreted literally, as the work of accumulating wealth through honest labor. But this labor, and its material fruit, go together with the spiritual work of moral improvement. There are clear contemporary parallels in what theorists of antiracism call “doing the work,” which functions as both a sign of one’s current enlightenment and of his or her commitment to continuous and endless self-improvement.
….
Weber argued that Protestant faiths were so well-suited to capitalist enterprise. To work hard is not just a spiritual duty, but a worldly one: if the hard work results in great wealth—well, that too is a sign that one can be counted among the blessed. Moral zealousness in the Protestant tradition is entirely compatible with a belief in progress combined with material success. The Catholic veneration of saints who lived a life of monastic poverty is alien to this sensibility.
The problem with dogma, whether it concerns original sin, the immortality of the soul, or antiracism, is that it prohibits skepticism. To have reservations about something that is treated as sacrosanct is to be an unbeliever, or worse, a heretic, and thus someone to be cast out.
Ian Buruma, Doing the Work, Harpers Magazine, July 2023
Woke Marketing and Business
Some business enterprises have adopted woke capitalism, using Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training, and marketing messages supporting left-wing values or causes of otherwise portraying organizations as “woke” to exploit the supposed values of a demographic generation to advance business interests. Some conservative critics have said that publishing industry is hiring woke (i.e. young progressive) employees who want to publish progressive books, and silencing conservative voices:
Some speakers and writers govern their language adhere to rules published in an equity language guide or to conform to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (“DEI”) rules or guidelines:
Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. … most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications … .
Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate.
George Packer, “The Moral Case Against Equity Language”, The Atlantic, March 2, 2023
Identity
Woke positions often are based on identity politics. Wikipedia, in September 2022 refers Identity politics as “… a political approach wherein people of a particular race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, social class, or other identifying factors develop political agendas that are based upon these identities. Identity politics is deeply connected with the idea that some groups in society are oppressed and begins with analysis of that oppression. The term is used primarily to describe political movements in western societies, covering nationalist, multicultural, women’s rights, civil rights, and LGBT movements. It might be better to say that identity politics is a cluster of beliefs held and behaviours of members of a woke culture. Identity politics is intersectional:
[A] person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender, to include the different experiences of women of color, women who are poor, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s different experiences and identities.
Wikipedia, September 2022, Intersectionality
Wikipedia has generally used the term Representative in the titles of
entries referring to Representative Democracy. Wikipedia uses the term
“Representation” mainly in entry titles about philosophy, linguistics
and semiotics such as representation in Art. Representation, as modified by modern usage, refers to the desire by members of groups who believe that their groups are being deprived or oppressed by not being recognized enough. Wikipedia uses Representation in its vernacular sense of visibility in the media in entries including Representation of African-Americans in media.
Intersectionality emerged in the U.S.A. from legal doctrines interpreting the meaning of discrimination under American leglislation, and from political movements and statements such as the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement. The concepts were embraced by European Marxist feminists, and by American leftists.
Post-Colonial
In some post-colonial settings, Western science is criticized as an artifact of colonialism, like boundaries, political institutions and religion. In places in Southern Africa, university students react to science by demanding that “science must fall”, and insisting that when science does not respect the intuition and conventional beliefs of colonized peoples, it is suspect.
Race
An essay in 2021 by Damian Linker, in the online magazine The Week, What the woke revolution is — and isn’t discussed the ideological connection of woke attitudes to critical race theory.
Postmodern
Postmodernism:
Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines deconstruction and post-structuralism.
….
Postmodernism relies on critical theory, which considers the effects of ideology, society, and history on culture. Postmodernism and critical theory commonly criticize universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.
… postmodernism was a mode of discourse on literature and literary criticism, commenting on the nature of literary text, meaning, author and reader, writing, and reading. Postmodernism developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century across many scholarly disciplines as a departure or rejection of modernism. As a critical practice, postmodernism employs concepts such as hyperreality, simulacrum, trace, and difference, and rejects abstract principles in favor of direct experience.
Wikipedia, October, 2022, Postmodernism
Postmodern literary criticism is a method of public argument and persuasive speech – a postmodern form of rhetoric.
Emotional Harm
In the western liberal tradition, freedom of conscience and speech are respected, allowing dissidents to promote their views of facts and values.
The woke claim that disagreement with their views of facts and their beliefs is disrespectful and/or harms them emotionally. Woke arguments are made by persons and groups to advance personal or group claims to resources and power. Several words are prefixed to the term phobia to criticize reluctance or overt opposition to granting resources, power and privileges to persons who claim to be members of historically oppressed or victimized groups, as phobias:
- for recognition of marriages between LGB persons “homophobic”,
- for cis male persons to be treated as women “transphobic”,
- to abolish the State of Israel or reduce its territory and power, and create a Palestinian state “Islamophobic”.
Disavowals of Woke
Fredrik de Boer, the American writer, Marxist and progressive, notes “I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.” and:
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene – woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.
Woke is defined by several consistent attributes. …
- Academic – …
- Immaterial – …
- Structural in analysis,individual in action – …
- Emotionalist – …
- Fatalistic – …
- Insistent that all political question are easy – …
- Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed – …
- …
Freddie deBoer, “Of Course You Know What Woke Means”, March 15, 2023, Substack (a paywalled internet publication, accessible in this instance)
American writer Susan Neiman noted, in an article published at the same time her book Left Is Not Woke was published (March 2023) :
Wokeness emphasises the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. But in the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Wokeness demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. But in the process, it often concludes that all history is criminal.
The concept of universalism once defined the Left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the Right, which recognised no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The Left demanded that the circle encompass the globe. …
The opposite of universalism is often called “identitarianism”, but the word is misleading, for it suggests that our identities can be reduced to, at most, two dimensions. … The reduction of the multiple identities we all possess to race and gender isn’t about physical appearance. It’s a focus on those dimensions which experienced the most generalisable trauma. This embodies a major shift that began in the mid-20th century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. The impulse to shift our focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History was told by the victors, while the victims’ voices went unheard. To turn the tables and insist that the victims’ stories enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. The movement to recognise the victims of slaughter and slavery began with the best of intentions. It recognised that might and right often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all sorts of people, and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it. Yet something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim; the impulse that began in generosity turned downright perverse.
….
Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialise that component over which we have the least control. I prefer the word “tribalism”, an idea which is as old as the Hebrew Bible. Tribalism is a description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else.
Universalism is now under fire on the Left because it is conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests. This happens daily in the name of corporate globalism. But let’s consider what a feat it was to make that original abstraction to humanity. Earlier assumptions were inherently particular, as earlier ideas of law were religious. The idea that one law should apply to Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of their common humanity is a relatively recent achievement which now shapes our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognise it as an achievement at all.
Susan Neiman, The true Left is not Woke, UnHerd, March 18, 2023
Susan Neiman’s book Left Is Not Woke was criticized by academics who are more sympathetic to modern progressive movements:
Left Is Not Woke, at its occasional best, is a plea for hope in progress. At times, Neiman does express sympathy for contemporary progressives, recognizing their “best of intentions” and acknowledging shared goals. …
But … Neiman has missed the point of the contemporary Left—a messy grouping of activist movements facing off against the intersectional crises of the present: climate change, gun violence, war, famine, fascism, police violence, carceral violence, transphobia—the list goes on. In fact, by lumping these groups into a monolithic whole, Neiman has imposed order, hierarchy, and coherence where there are, in fact, often little more than complex and overlapping sympathies among an inherently fractured political Left.
What these groups do share is the certainty that if we have any hope of confronting the future—of even surviving into the future—we need new ways of thinking. We need doubt about the structures and ideas that brought us to this point. If we are living in a world that the Enlightenment made, a world that in the centuries since Kant’s first editions has suffered imperialism, genocide, climate change, and more—much of it imposed by “enlightened” Europeans—it is worth asking if the Enlightenment is all its advocates purport it to be.
Samuel Clowes Huneke, “Critically Cringe: On Susan Neiman’s ‘Left Is Not Woke’”, LA Review of Books, September 17, 2023
Conservative Criticism
David Frum criticized “political correctness” by modern American radicals, academics and students but did not use “woke” in his article “Liberals and the Illberal Left” in the Atlantic in 2015. Woke can be used, in American political discussion by classical (i.e. not a progressive or social justice leftist) liberal, a libertarian or by a “silent majority” conservative to criticize “woke” values or behaviors.
The term “woke” used by people who hold right-wing views, can suggest disapproval. In 2020 – 2023 Conservative Republicans seeking some electoral traction within or for their party claimed that “woke” values are wrong. Right-wing commentators accuse leftists of being members of an educated elite that is out of touch with the conditions or the work and life of “ordinary” people.
Some right wing commentators claim unless the left changes rhetorical course, its language and purity-policing will leave it isolated from the masses. Some accuse social justice leftists of being members of a condescending elite which embodies the progressive tendency towards depoliticisation: contests over material conditions give way to therapeutic journeys for those at the top, with working-class people cast as the oafs and bigots in need of being coerced into enlightenment. Some right wing commentators, as of 2023, argue that they have won the culture war against using woke as a positive term:
People on the far right use the term “woke” to trivialize the demands and goals of groups who identify themselves as marginalized or the victims of harms, including the effects of historical injustices.
The libertarian legal academic, Ilya Somin, writing in the modern American conservative publication The Dispatch argues that “communists … install[ed] horrific dictatorships in many countries. But communism isn’t a woke ideology focused on racial and ethnic grievances. It’s a universalist ideology, one that routinely repressed ethnic minorities where it comes to power”:
… concerns about wokeness have distracted many on the center-right from a more serious danger, one far more likely to gain widespread support and cause great harm: nationalism. Terrible woke ideas should be criticized. However, their impact is limited by the smaller numbers of their proponents. Nationalists are far more numerous. And if nationalists acquire the power they seek, they would implement an agenda that does great harm to the lives, freedom, and well-being of millions of people.
….
To be sure, woke ideology disproportionately appeals to the highly educated, which gives wokeists an edge in the media, academia, and various bureaucratic institutions. However, nationalists have enough highly educated personnel of their own to counter. TV networks like Fox News and “national conservative” think tanks like The Heritage Foundation (which is planning a wide-ranging nationalist agenda
for Trump’s possible second term) provide nationalists with enough
media influence and brainpower to get by. Wokeist influence over
regulatory bureaucracies is counterbalanced by greater nationalist
influence over law enforcement entities—the government agencies with the greatest power to arrest and detain people—and their potential to once again control the White House, which has great leverage over federal regulatory agencies.
History also shows nationalist movements are a menace to liberal political institutions. Whether in 1930s Germany or present-day Russia, nationalist movements have subverted liberal democracy and installed brutal dictatorships in its place. By contrast, not a single wokeist egalitarian movement has achieved such a result.
Racial and ethnic minorities have sometimes managed to impose
dictatorships over an ethnic majority (as in apartheid-era South
Africa). But in those cases, the minority group relied on military and
organizational superiority, not on something like a woke egalitarian
ideology. There is no real chance of wokeists achieving such military
superiority in the U.S. or any other Western nation.
Ilya Somin, “Wokeness Is Awful. Nationalism Is Far Worse. ” The Dispatch, July 1, 2024
American, WEIRD, or International
Americans like other groups of people, respect the wisdom of people who think like them and deplore the ignorance and recklessness of people who do not think like them. For generations, Americans have been:
- self-centered:
- acquisitive;
- ambitious;
- individualist:
- oriented to individual choices and preferences;
- asserting individual morality and authenticity;
- emotional or sentimental;
- confident in their own judgments, including judgments based on intuition, faith and emotional feelings;
- deprecating education and expertise as elitist;
- maintaining that they are humble, normal or common
- not acknowledging their advantages and privileges but reluctant to give up any political, economic or social advantage or privilege.
The English writer, D.H. Lawrence, writing in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) commented on the early 19th century author James Fenimore Cooper’s fictional frontiersman Natty Bumppo (aka Hawkeye):
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, cited by A.O. Scott, paywalled (?) article/essay, New York Times, July 29, 2023
Respect for the competent, hard, individualism of the frontier has continued in American literature and culture.
Several generations of Americans have used some parts of some of the languages of personal growth, psychology, sociology, economics, and other social sciences. Some ideas in those sciences are reported in the media and become part of a cultural awareness. Post traumatic stress disorder now recognized as a psychiatric disorder, was and is controversial in many ways. However, trauma has become accepted, in many cases, by millions of Americans, as an explanation for unusual thoughts and actions.
In the early 21st century, people of all generations, in many places, use business jargon, and hold beliefs that markets, individualism, and consumerism are unchangeable and irresistible forces of nature. Many accept that markets can resolve all social, political and economic issues and that is possible to do well (succeed financially) by being good (acting ethically). Whether an individual has a “Left” ideology, and regardless of age, the majority share some of the views of older generations about society, history and values:
- progress is a historical movement from older values to their values, which will liberate them and would liberate oppressed groups – racial groups, gender groups, etc.,
- a sense that if they did not acquire power and resources fast enough, oppressed groups can force the issue.
- a sense that their historical time has come, and
Woke American and WEIRD (members of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies) millennials are woke to white privilege, calls for inclusive rights by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons and other concerns.
Asian millennials may be more woke to colonialism and imperialism than to white privilege than white WEIRD millennials, but seem to be as focused on career and accumulating wealth. Any millennial may be versed in the language of popular psychology and may be a sensitive snowflake in a social way. More conservative WEIRD millennials may assert an individual sense of justice, morality and authenticity as being “based”.
