Waking up to Woke, Part II

In earlier writing, I characterized some tenets of “woke” activism as follows:

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

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

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

(4) What white people did in the past is judged according to current trends by a mob-like process that does not consider hard evidence or the rules in effect when acts were committed. 

The statements above were easily derived from public statements of “social justice” activists.  Some cultural critics have gone deeper and see woke activism as the product of a radical post-modern philosophy that arrived in the US in the 1960s, spread through university humanities departments in the 1970s and 80s, then migrated from campuses to the general population in the 21^st century.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detailed the rise of post-modern ideas culminating in critical race theory, grievance studies, and cancel culture in a book entitled: Cynical Theories – How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.

This book seeks to accurately describe variants of post-modern thinking, where each came from, how they developed, and, ultimately, manifested themselves in current culture.  Despite its depth, this book is meant to be read by intelligent non-specialists as a sort of self-help manual.

Lindsay sees the post-modernist, critical theories that he describes as a full-on attack on liberalism which he says embraced the Enlightenment ideas of skeptical, evidenced-based, scientific inquiry conducted by individuals, seen as equal before the law, learning universal objective truths, living life, enjoying liberty, and creating representative, democratic governments.  Cynical Theories makes it clear that every variant of post-modernism rejects scientific inquiry, objective truths, liberty, equality before the law, and the sovereignty of individuals.  Pluckrose and Lindsay are in sync with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now except that Pinker said little about post-modernism or woke.          

Recently, former President Obama, in a recent TV interview, mentioned that his daughters believe cancel culture may be going too far.  In the same interview, he chided Republicans for worrying about Critical Race Theory in public schools, suggesting they have more important things to do.

Obama’s statements illustrate a popular belief among US political leaders and the media that an all-out attack on foundational ideas of the USA is nothing to worry about. It seems clear that a successful attack on our foundational ideas must lead to the destruction of our current way of life.  So, whether or not you like CRT, it seems like you should be thinking about it.  This is where someone usually pops up and quotes Ayn Rand saying something like: “ideas have consequences”.

On their face, some ideas within Critical Race Theory [such as (1)-(4) at the top] seem pretty dopey.  That is, they are inconsistent with common sense and sound like they would not work well if implemented. Most people would see CRT as “unfair”, and it does not really blend well with the American way of life over the past century. So, CRT is not blending in.  Either it is right, and we need to change everything, or it’s wrong, and it needs to go.

A certain slice of America has been arguing since the late 1960’s that the USA is evil and has advocated revolutionary change.  These advocates communicate in an unusual way, re-inventing words to change their meaning, blaming others frequently, and acting like religious zealots. Significantly, in criticizing the US and its ways, they rarely point to another country, and say. “Man, Finland is so much better.  I am going there right now.”  They aren’t going anywhere. If they talk about going anywhere, it is usually Canada, the country most like the USA, and easiest to reach.

If the USA were so bad, wouldn’t they want to go quickly to somewhere that is very different?

We don’t think that is what is going on here.  We think that people who say: “America is not great.”, or “American was never great;” are confidence men.  They want to sell America short by talking down the value until they are able to acquire it cheaply.  Only the really thoughtless and shallow people, like the majority of America’s new media, would fall for a con game like that.

Categories: Commentary, Philosophy, Politics