The term “woke” has acquired wide currency.  According to Google, it means: “awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice”.  Surprisingly, it seems that people on all sides of the culture war have a similar understanding of “woke”.  A problem only arises when different groups of people start to talk about “justice”.  We’ll get back to that later.  

Some say the culture war has already been won by the left, but it is more accurate to say that it has been won “on the left”.  That is, although “woke beliefs” have won over leftist intellectuals, they have not been accepted by a majority of Americans.  When a belief system becomes dominant within leading universities, and the news media, some would say that it no longer matters what the majority of Americans believe.  Such a belief system will be offered to them daily, like a medication, until, eventually, they swallow it.

Before predicting the future, maybe we should look at what is inside of this pill. While it true that a consensus among academics, and the media can be powerful, the particular pill they are pushing is not very tasty and will be extremely difficult for many to swallow.

Back to the word “justice”, which is so appealing that woke warriors have attached it to everything they do.  Anyone who owns a screen saw the 2020 riots consuming lives and property valued at $1 billion.  The media told us we were seeing “mostly peaceful” demonstrations aimed at “social justice”.  To some of us, it seemed odd that threats and $1 billion losses were inflicted on people of limited means who had nothing whatever to do with the injustices claimed by demonstrators.  This did not seem like justice to most Americans.

Most Americans learned a different type of justice, one in which facts collected according to rules were reviewed by an impartial judge and jury, leading to retribution only against those proven guilty. Further, the punishment must fit the crime, and could not be “cruel or unusual”. 

Even if you believe whites are always guilty, the number of non-white property owners and non-white police punished during these riots was substantial.  So, where was the justice in this social justice?  If you just landed from 1957, you would conclude that “social justice” must be a new type of justice with only a slight resemblance (or maybe no resemblance) to classical justice.

There is more to this woke belief system than punishing innocent bystanders. Here are some tenets of the woke belief system:

(1) Systemic racism is endemic, though we have no evidence for it.

(2) White people generally are responsible for any bad things other white people did in the past.

(3) Non-whites generally are not responsible for anything bad they do now or did in the past.

(4) What people did in the past is judged according to current fads and fashion (without regard to the laws or rules of their own time) according to a process that resembles that of a lynch mob.

I think you are getting the idea that this kind of justice only works if you don’t think about it too much.  Self-righteous social justice evokes sympathy from many with its quick half-truths, exaggeration, and inuendo, but as Americans of all ages, colors, and persuasions think more deeply about woke beliefs, the woke pill will continue to be difficult for most Americans to swallow.

Categories: Commentary, Culture, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics