The Grotesque Naïveté of the “Woke”

2023-10-01

If you believe that “wokism” is a positive and progressive political movement, do you also believe that Islam is a religion of peace?

Sommaire en français Si vous croyez que le « wokisme » est un mouvement politique positif et progressiste, trouvez-vous également que l’islam est une religion de paix ?

There are people who support the anti-Enlightenment pseudo-left (i.e. “wokism”) because they like the word “woke,” because they consider it to have positive connotations, such as being aware of injustices and wanting to end them.

That is like supporting Christianity because many people use the word “Christian” as a synonym for good and kind. It is like supporting the powerful Polish “Law and Justice” party—a right-wing party, very pro-Catholic—because the name includes the word “justice” and we are all in favour of that, aren’t we, in particular social justice?

How dimwitted can a person be?

Has there ever been an elected politician who did not claim to advocate freedom, in one form or another? Does that mean they are all to be trusted as proponents of freedom and are all worthy of our support? Of course not. Many of them—perhaps most—are dissembling. We need to look more closely, of course.

It takes a certain dullness of mind for a person to support a movement simply because it claims to be “woke.” The anti-Enlightenment pseudo-left is a toxic, racist and fanatical cult which has corrupted the political left. It rejects universalism and discredits the left, thus strengthening the political right. It deserves our criticism, not our endorsement.

Toxic Ideologies

The anti-Enlightenment pseudo-left, or more succinctly the post-left, involves a complex mixture of dubious ideologies. The two most important of these are Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Gender Theory.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a pseudoscience which holds that:

• Racial identity is the most important thing about a person. Forget personality, education, personal qualities, quirks and taste. Forget all other personal attributes.
• Racism is ominipresent, unavoidable and cannot not be present in all situations;
• Racism occurs only in one direction, i.e. whites are racist towards non-whites. Whites are always racist and non-whites never are.
• White people cannot understand racism and must remain silent on the issue, always deferring to non-whites.
• Any disparity between groups, especially racial groups, must be the result of racism or similar injustice. Any other contributing factor is rejected out of hand.

Critical Race Theory is an antiracist ideology in the same way that Islam is a religion of peace.

Like many pseudosciences, religions and ideologies, CRT is non falsifiable. For example, if one believes that racism is always present in any situation, it is a simple matter to label some innocuous behaviour as racist. CRT is a generator of guilt and paranoïa. It is a great boon to the political right, because it allows the right to dismiss the antiracist movement as insane, which it obviously has become since it adopted this ideology. Critical Race Theory is an antiracist ideology in the same way that Islam is a religion of peace.

Gender Theory is a pseudoscience which holds that:

• Sex is a social construct and thus on a continuum, when in reality sex is a biological reality and it is binary, as the only sexes are male and female.
• There exists in each individual an innate gender identity which takes precedence over the person’s sex which is considered assigned at birth, whereas only the individual can know their gender identity.

Gender identity is like the Christian soul: an ethereal entity which is unobservable.

Social constructivism is extremely damaging, as it leads to self-identification, so that a man may simply declare himself a woman (or vice versa) and demand access to women-only spaces and events. Lesbians are vilified for rejecting the sexual advances of men who identify as women. Gender identity is like the Christian soul: an ethereal entity which is unobservable. Thus, like CRT, the existence of gender identity is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. To posit its existence is the pretense used to justify applying so-called “sex-change” procedures to minors—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sometimes even invasive surgeries including mastectomy and castration. When such procedures are applied to fully consenting adults, there is no problem. However, minors are too young to give informed consent to serious medical interventions whose necessity is very much in doubt.

The Best and the Worst of European Civilization

For the post-left, European culture is irremediably evil.

The Enlightenment is arguably the greatest achievement of European civilization, and that is precisely what the post-left rejects. The post-left is itself a product of European civilization, but it rejects Europeanness utterly, maintaining that everything about it is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. For the post-left, European culture is irremediably evil. The post-left—a.k.a. “wokism”—is thus arguably the worst possible product of European civilization. At its most extreme, i.e. as promoted by its most pious adherents, the post-left constitutes a masochistic, self-destructive, even suicidal (i.e. culturally suicidal) rejection of one’s own Europeanness—a.k.a. “whiteness.”

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Next blog: The Long March of Emotional Blackmail