Woke-thought, especially in the form of Critical Race Theory, has drilled deeply into many of our primary sense-making institutions: schools, government, corporations and news media. Cancel culture is its enforcement arm as you can read in many places including this website. Wokesters refuse to subject their ideas to public scrutiny, as Coleman Hughes recently discovered. How do we turn this ship around? How do we publicly and effectively shame people whose version of morality is to shove each other into color categories and treat some of those colors with scorn?
How do we pressure those who espouse these types of principles? Is there an end in sight?
James Lindsay, who created the above graphic (and who created the website New Discourses) recently wrote an article titled, “Wokeness will bring a second Renaissance,” in which he argues that artists have just about had their fill of all of this political correctness:
What is it that artists across the arts have had enough of? Woke colonization. Woke censorship. Woke culture. Woke hegemony. Woke complaining. Woke negativity about everything. Wokeness. Period.
Artists are telling me more and more frequently that they’ve had it with Woke control over their professions and their outlets. This is an interesting circumstance because artists who feel silenced, repressed, controlled, and dominated will, as reliably as day follows night in the morning, begin to produce incredible works of powerful, defiant, and subversive art. They will make art that will communicate the injustice of this oppression in a way that does something no amount of intellectual explaining can possibly do. They will make art to connect with people—and to connect people to the oppression they sense but don’t know how to make sense of. . . . What I’m hearing from artists is a cry to produce the beautiful again. The stirring. The unsettling. The hilarious. To get out of this stifling environment and throw off stagnation.
James argues that art is organic and artists are unstoppable. He believes that help is on the way in the form of art..
I’m more than ready for this to happen.
