What Does “Woke” Mean?

What does "Woke" mean? Here are two recent posts worth considering. First, Matt Orfalea posed the question on Twitter, which launched a worthy thread:

Here are a few of the offerings, among the many in the thread:

Excessive, shallow and myopic focus on social justice

Woke people are special, they feel they are above constitutional principles like equality and free speech.

A toolbox full of identity-based attacks you can use to target people you already don't like

Second, Freddie deBoer offered a detailed description of the meaning of "woke" in his article, "Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means: I'd rather use any other term at this point, but can we get real please? Here's the basic definition:

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

“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.

DeBoer then offered a list of attributes:

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities...

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real...

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions...

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics...

Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change...

Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma...

Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed - what was assumed by Bertrand Russel to be obviously misguided is now assumed to be true without evaluation: virtue is not just common among the oppressed, virtue is a function of oppression...

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable...

I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that...

This is an excellent read and I would urge those interested to read Freddie's entire article.

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What it Means to be “Woke”

The term "woke" refers to something real. It is important to get clear on what that thing is because we are in the throes of a powerful social movement that is working very hard to evade criticism by refusing to allow us to utter its name.

I have used "woke" for the past few years and I'm not giving up on this perfectly adequate term. There are other almost synonymous terms such as "social justice movement," but nothing quite captures Wokeness like Woke. I'm sticking with "woke," even though the Woke now accuse those who use this term of being insulting or bigoted. The "woke" will be insulted no matter how far down we go down the line of cascading euphemisms, however. This succession is sometimes referred to as a "euphemism treadmill."  Another example of the euphemism treadmill can be found with the history of the word "retarded."  At its core, "retarded" means slow thinking.

Many people have used the term "retarded" to describe a real life phenomenon that can be plainly seen in some people, unfortunately. Others have used it as an explicative and a pejorative, to hurt someone's feelings, often directing this insult at people who are not diagnosably slow in their ability to think.  The fact that the word "retarded" can be used to both describe a real phenomenon and as an insult has resulted in the concoction of a comically long list of synonyms. Every time a new euphemism is invented, someone uses the newly created euphemism as an insult and then people go back to the blackboard to create a new synonym for slow thinking.  

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It’s Time for You to Speak Up

Because so many people often think as obedient members America's two political teams, those of us who are free-thinkers are commonly ostracized, scorned and censored for asking obvious questions and stating obvious facts. That is, until . . .  once in a while . . . on one-fine-day, the dam breaks and then it is suddenly appropriate to once again talk freely about a topic. I won't give many examples here because this is happening regarding almost every important national issue. Consider COVID masks and lab leaks, for example. This herky-jerky way of talking at each other is massively inefficient and the effect is to severely crimp human flourishing. It's like we are all attending Lord-of-the-Flies High School. I will offer three short points:

1. This has become an era of "truth infrastructures." Social teams, media operations, non-profit entities and bureaucracies on both the right and the left are coordinating together to maintain and defend their official narratives. The narrative much be honored, even if it lacks an evidentiary foundation and even if it contrary to the evidence. We need to push hard these days to get the team players to acknowledge obvious facts. Our public discourse now has the same dynamics that Thomas Kuhn attributed to science:

During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper’s falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

In short, we free-thinkers need to grind away forcing evidentiary pressure build up until official narratives finally pop.  Again, what a terribly inefficient way to communicate as a society.

2. There is no easy solution to this national team sport of talking at each other. We free-thinkers need to have immense amounts of stamina and courage to speak up. We are often the victims of barrages of ad hominem attacks.  We need the courage to persevere in the repeated lack of apparent progress. We also need the courage to point out the mistakes of those who we might feel to be on our "own" team. Courage is the key. Nietzsche often wrote about the relationship between truth and courage. Here are several of his aphorisms on courage:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

[T]he forcefulness with which you approach truth is proportionate to the distance courage dares to advance. Knowledge, saying yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and fleeing in the face of reality - which is to say the ‘ideal’ - is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness... They are not free to know: decadents need lies, it is one of the conditions for their preservation.

Even the bravest among us only rarely has courage for what he really knows . . .

Where to we get that courage and stamina?  There are brave free-thinkings who go out there every day and they are leading the way.  Some of my favorites include Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, John McWhorter, Sam Harris, Glenn Loury, The three hosts on The Fifth Column podcast, Abigail Shrier, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Ed Snowden, Colin Wright, Claire Lehmann and the rest of the gang at Quillette, Andrew Sullivan, Eric Weinstein, New Discourses, Wilfred Reilly, Jesse Singal, Chloe Valdary, Peter Boghossian, Coleman Hughes, Bill Maher, Christina Sommers, Christopher Rufo, Benjamin Boyce, Aaron Mate, Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points, Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss and Jodi Shaw. I'm sure that I've forgotten a couple dozen others. Bonus points to Brett Weinstein for his recent heroics. Just be brave like these people, even though you will be ridiculed and gaslit.  If you are a sincere and kind-hearted truth teller, you will often be called names. When that happens, wear those insults like a badge of honor! You need to speak up especially when no one else is speaking up, as Soloman Asch demonstrated in the 1950s.

3. Even when we know we are correct about our facts, we can't simply shout them from the mountaintops.  We also need immense amounts of patience to neutralize the tactics used by the members of America's two Team Thinkers. We free-thinkers can't just be right. We also need to be effective by picking our spots and navigating contorted arguments containing words with upside-down definitions. Why do we need to be patient?  Because our plan should be to prevail in the long run, not take snarky little shots in the short-run. Also consider that those who attack us often think that they are doing the right thing.  They are often as fired up as we are.  They are also convinced that the ends justifies the means, and the means include every logical and evidentiary fallacy in the book, though ad hominem attacks are the bread and butter. Our goals should be to recruit them to our side by showing them the error of their ways.  For the past year, I have been writing dozens of articles at this website in an attempt to patiently collect the lost sheep.

3. I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi's quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Instead of cordial civil discourse where people follow the Heterodox Academy HxA Way, Our teams push and pull to win rather collaborating as individuals to tease out truths.

In sum, each of us needs the unbridled innocent curiosity of a child, the courage of a lion, and the calm patience of a diplomat. Now get out there, tell carefully articulated truths and get called names.  Over and over.  You will be making progress and when other quiet people see you taking some hits, they will be inspired to speak up too.

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Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

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Abraham Lincoln, Racist . . .

Oh, I see it is still 2020.  Apparently, fighting a bloody war to end slavery and writing the Emancipation Proclamation are not impressive enough. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Abraham Lincoln, an iconic American hero, could soon be an outcast in San Francisco, his legacy called into question and his name ripped off a high school. Lincoln is one of dozens of historical figures who, according to a school district renaming committee, lived a life so stained with racism, oppression or human rights violations, they do not deserve to have their name on a school building.

Once again, where do you draw your line with the Woke? At what point do you say "Enough"? If we don't speak up about this insanity, haven't we also implicitly voted to tear down the Lincoln Memorial?

Continue ReadingAbraham Lincoln, Racist . . .