At the Oxford Union a few months ago, Toby – who as well as being Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Sceptic is General Secretary of the Free Speech Union – delivered an impressive speech in favour of the motion “This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far”. It was uploaded to YouTube about a week ago.
Several times in his speech Toby expressed the view that it is not the ends of woke culture that are objectionable, but rather the means used to try to attain those ends.
Toby is not alone in his view. Far from it. In the last three or four years I have lost count of the number of times my heart has sunk when, usually early on in an otherwise excellent article or podcast, someone criticising wokeness says the woke “have good intentions”, their behaviour is “well-intentioned”, or “they mean well”. In other words, their heart is in the right place, and their goal is a noble one. It is only their chosen route to that goal which is a problem.
I think people who believe this about the woke have misjudged the situation in several ways. And in the battle against the often pernicious effects of wokeness, this matters. Such praise is unjust and hands the woke a free gift they simply do not deserve.
One of the main problems with thinking the woke have honourable intentions and laudable goals is not that they really have malicious intentions and wish to cause misery – though there is a pretty good case to be made for that view, which I’ll return to below. Nor is it that the woke’s relentlessly sanctimonious attitude and their uncompromising and often brutal behaviour greatly outweigh any supposedly good intentions, to the extent that they aren’t worth mentioning. The problem is more fundamental than that.
It is clear from what the woke say and do that they are in the grip of a powerful ideology. They are therefore not truly free agents calmly and voluntarily making a series of rational decisions which they believe are in the interests of all, or even in the interests of some. Quite the opposite. They are effectively slaves to the ideology, and are ultimately acting in their own interests, to meet the demands made of them by the grand meta-narrative that has possessed them.
We might even have begun to pity the woke for their state of mental bondage if it wasn’t for the fact that their views are so damaging – and that we know their worldview brings them a satisfying sense of meaning and virtuousness. But because they are not entirely free in their choices and actions, praising their intentions and their goals, however briefly and in passing it is done, is misguided. It is like praising rabbits for breeding, or a dog for chasing a ball.
I feel I may be more justified than some in making this case, because – if you will pardon the expression – I have lived experience of what I‘m talking about. I was once a true believer; a youthful, headstrong disciple of Marx, who – having seen the light – wandered the streets of a northern town feeling superior and misunderstood. This was some time ago, when the far Left was primarily concerned with class inequalities rather than the woke obsession with race and gender. I eventually liberated myself from the ideology and subsequently lived an almost normal life, as if nothing untoward had taken place. The point is, it taught me that during that time I was not my own man and should not have been praised for wanting to save the world.
There is another reason why we should not, in any way, commend the woke: their actual goals, as they exist in reality, are not commendable. What they say they seek – equality, justice, and as Toby said at the Oxford Union, “to reduce prejudice and discrimination and improve outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups” – are not really ends at all. They are, in the main, only vague generalisations and abstractions, and indeed ones which reflect the ideology by which the woke have been captured. What the woke need to be judged on, and praised for if justified, are their ends as they are in practice, on what they aim for and increasingly achieve on the ground.
So let’s judge them. Let’s see how things are going with wokeness, when it comes to actual ends, not some likely unachievable utopian ideals.
Is it good, for example, that in Scotland, 16 year-olds may soon be able to self-declare their gender? Is it good that, under the same legislation, the dignity and sex-based rights of women, fought-for for so long, are being attacked? Ends like these, which are claimed to provide equality for trans people, knowingly disregard the rights and interests of so many others. Were the woke ever going to achieve what they think is trans equality in a different and more reasonable way? It’s doubtful. So it is probably fair to say that they are driven as much by malice towards some, as by anything else.
Is it good that white people, whatever they say or do, are deemed by the woke to be inherently racist? Or that black and ethnic minorities are constantly encouraged to believe everything is stacked against them? Most importantly, would any of that change if equality of outcome was achieved? Again, it’s doubtful. I’m struggling to see how the aims of the woke are good, even for those whose interests the woke claim to represent.
And should we automatically assume that, even if it was possible, aiming for a 50-50 gender balance in all types of employment would not have potentially negative effects elsewhere, such as for family life, for the quality of children’s upbringing and their wellbeing, and for the companies and organisations themselves prioritising quotas over competence?
And should we be happy that, in the most tolerant civilisation that has ever existed, buildings, police cars, firework displays, zebra crossings and sometimes even trains, are subjected to the rainbow treatment, as though bigotry is rife? You can argue that this is a means not an end. But it feels very much like such things have often become ends in themselves, rather than another step towards equality. The separation between woke means and ends isn’t so clear cut.
And then, of course, there are questions about whether equality as an end is a good, when there are strong arguments suggesting hierarchies, whether you like them or not, and despite their downsides, have always been the natural and most beneficial way for a society to be structured.
And it could even be that the more frustrated the woke become in not achieving their abstract and supposedly noble ends, the more vicious and deranged the means will become. Best not to agree with the woke that those ends are good.
Of course, few if any of the things I cite above, whether means or ends, are good, and everyone but the woke know it. I am simply asking those who I feel are sometimes too generous to the woke, to bear them in mind and re-examine their belief that “the moral impulse underpinning this movement is laudable”, as Toby put it.
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I’m a straight, German man. Hence, I’m intersectionally personally to blame for everything that’s considered to be wrong in the world and enjoy the utmost undeserved privilege anybody could possibly enjoy, or, put into other words I am The Enemy!!1
I have no issues with people who believe I’m their enemy. I simply consider them enemies of me, whatever their supposed goals are.
I’ve also had enough of a Christian education to recognize the Christian nature of the concepts of original sin and lifelong atonement (allyship) in order to achieve redemption which are covertly reused here. It’s just that the woketards have put themselves in the place formerly occupied by God. I don’t believe they deserve this position.
Oh, straight in the euphemistic sense?
I heard that “straight” Hungarian men don’t particularly feel they are enjoying undeserved privilege…
Incidentally. patriarchy is also a Christian concept…
It’s not. This comes from the Latin pater familias, the head of a family household all other family members are subject to.
I’ve have no idea what you mean by euphemistic here. I know straight as equivalent to heterosexual (but shorter to write).
Another euphemism. There is no such word as “heterosexual”. English has become so debased…
The Marxist comparison is, not by coincidence, a good one. The Marxist student I knew back in the day, preparing the list of those who would need to be eliminated “come the revolution” (eg priests, landlords, consultants, capitalists, and priests again just in case) was done in the name of liberty, equality and all those nice ideals. But the destruction of class enemies was actually the end and not just the means, because that was what was thought going to produce the utopia, ex opere operato. On that basis, Pol Pot had good intentions too.
For example it does seem that the ratchet of goals in sexual morality, now continued over two or three generations, resembles more a series of means to the long-stated end of abolishing the family and (I would suggest) a God-given created order, than it does a set of humanitarian aims.
If by abolishing “the family” you mean abolishing patriarchy, then you are at least somewhat correct. Patriarchy is not timeless, it has a beginning (about 7000 years ago), and it has an end (in the not too distant future). But patriarchy is really not the only model of family to choose from. It was always since its inception hardwired to self-destruct sooner or later, and it requires a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up. Once those props fall, so too does the system.
As for the thing about priests, it seems like a desire to have a “Reverse Inquisition” more than anything else. The Red Terror of the Spanish Civil War comes to mind. Not that that was a good thing, of course. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind (per Gandhi).
Here is a comparison between a Marxist revolutionary and a Christian and how each values life:
“Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.” – Pol Pot
“It were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch” – Thomas Maule [Prominent Quaker in colonial Salem, Massachusetts]
Depends on which flavor of Christianity, I guess. Quakers have long been among the nicest and most progressive (in the original, non-woke sense of the word) Christians out there.
The use of the term “woke” by black Americans I was shocked to find, began in the US in the 1940s.
The Oxford dictionary expanded its definition of the word “woke” in 2017 to add it as an adjective meaning “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”.
It would now appear that current affairs of any stripe have been hijacked by either “woke” or use of the term. I was happier a decade go when I wasn’t even aware of the expression.
It’s almost like….wait for it…cultural appropriation! The irony, lol.
In a society like ours that has reached a level of prosperity such that pretty much everyone can cover their basic needs and more, what is there left to fight for?
Got to invent something. Some choose to fabricate enemies.
We have reached that level of prosperity where it’s possible that pretty much everyone can cover their basic needs and more. But due to the lopsided distribution of that prosperity, where 1% of the population owns nearly half (!) of the wealth, the goal of shared prosperity has remained rather elusive. And such ludicrously extreme inequality is highly toxic to society and civilization. Worst of all, it only gives ammunition to the wokesters who do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
Just saying.
I think there’s a big distinction to be made between people who go along with some of the “woke agenda” or who acquiesce to it – often goodthinking, middle class people who like to be thought of as “nice” and find it horrid that there are people in the world who they perceive to be “suffering”, feel guilty and support woke causes to make this uncomfortableness go away. Those people sort of have good intentions (though you could view it as selfish). There are other sets of people in this equation who decidedly do not have good intentions, who are using this agenda to divide and conquer or simply keep their grift going. The goodthinking have allowed this to happen.
With a 1980s socialisation, I should really belong to the group you call goodthinking
because everything the woke claim to want to achieve was already considered self-evident by then: Women and men are generally equally capable and rightly have equal rights, racism is a bad, nobody should be persecuted or socially shunned because of sexual preferences etc. Things started to smell funny when – around 2000 – a female student said something like “Now, please don’t say That’s just because you’re a woman! because of this!” I was totally baffled and couldn’t believe that – in 2000! – people were still thinking stuff like that.
I then started to notice that all of these problems we had believed to be solved in the past already started to come back to life, or rather, back to unlife: Society hadn’t suddenly changed for the worse, the goalposts where being moved instead in order to give the impression that, wrt social justice, absolutely nothing had been achieved since 1950. I was then supposed to learn that all men are violently misogynistic rapists, all white people genocidal racists, all straight people born haters of all non-straight ones etc. Instead, I learnt something else: There were professional support and management organizations for all these injustice problems which were running idle as their work was largely done. In order to prevent that, they were inventing new ways how the problems they wanted to deal with could be transposed onto a society lacking them (except in corner cases).
Over time, that caused me to become considerably less goodthinking and I don’t believe anybody has a valid excuse to be goodthinking wrt this particular issue. Your own term race hustler capture this very nicely.
Yup, that’s pretty much where I am. I’ve grown up in a largely “liberal” “goodthinking” milieu but slowly but surely my capacity (handicap) of noticing stuff has led to me have all sorts of opinions that are considered “far right”. I’ve generally stopped bothering to socialise with goodthinking people because they get terribly upset and huffy or shocked when it turns out I’m just a horrid racist, sexist, transphobe pig.
Something I forgot here I noticed in hindsight: 1991, the environmental problem which was terribly en vogue was catastrophical global warming. But it was supposed to be caused by a hole in the ozone layer over the north pole. Nowadays, the environmental probem that’s terribly en vogue is still catastrophical global warming (slowly transitioning to climate change) but the exact same people who talked about the ozone layer in 1991 are now talking about carbondioxide and claim they had already knew about the CO2 problem since the 1960s/ 70s. Something obviously doesn’t hang together here.
For people who understand German, this song documents the original catastrophical global warming problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epi91coSM_w&list=OLAK5uy_lu9uVTIVn_gP5AbnJz6f9yp0ZLuhHI53g&index=8
I’m old enough to remember lots of serious people in the 1970s worrying about a new ice age allegedly round the corner – presumably because the earth really had cooled a little bit in the mid-20th century.
E.g. here’s Leonard Nimoy:
Bernie’s Tweets on Twitter: “CLIMATE CHANGE- Remember when they tried to terrify you with climate cooling? Same grift, different decade https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f921.svg https://t.co/Su4JB5iJen” / Twitter
Don’t forget the acid rain!
I fondly remembered that when the still eerily familar pictures of the dead trees recently again featured as dreadful consequences of climate change.
Global warming is different, though: There, they swapped the cause and not the catastrophe. Possibly because of already existing infrastructure (conjecture).
Ed Dutton recently described the “woke” as spiteful mutants.
Over the last few years I have come to the conclusion that the woke, despite their claims of high ideals, are basically not nice people who have completely closed minds.
I think some people get involved in the movement with good intentions, but if they stay in it, they’ve decided to cross over to the dark side. Many join it because they hate themselves and are full of hatred for people who have succeeded in life, especially of people who are happy. Many woke-ists are mentally ill on some level.
Prince Harry has become woke to strike out at the people he resents. His brother, William, married the right woman and has three delightful children. Harry hates seeing William happy: he’s supposed to be miserable and screwed up like Harry.
People who commit to woke-ism are bad, often damaged, people. The lower ranks are people who are failures on some level, who lack agency, who resent other people’s success, happiness and contentment. They can also be manipulated into violent behaviour. The upper ranks are in it for money and control. Like the lower ranks, they hate happy people and they crave control of their environment.
They have to be treated as a societal cancer and fought.
“And then, of course, there are questions about whether equality as an end is a good, when there are strong arguments suggesting hierarchies, whether you like them or not, and despite their downsides, have always been the natural and most beneficial way for a society to be structured.”
Reminds me of a piece I saw on the “Beauty of Patriarchy”. At the risk of being controversial I will say that patriarchy is a beautiful thing (and by the way the society we live in today where many children grow up without good male role models is absolutely toxic).
“Beauty of Patriarchy”, lol. The grass always looks greener on the other side, of course, but guess what? It still has to be mowed. So be very careful what you wish for.
Patriarchy is not timeless, it has a beginning (about 7000 years ago), and it has an end (in the not too distant future). It was always since its inception hardwired to self-destruct sooner or later, and it requires a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up. Once those props fall, so too does the operating system.
And it is entirely possible for good male role models to exist without men literally lording it over women and children. (Unless perhaps you have a different definition of “patriarchy”?)
QED
I’m so glad you said this, David, if you’re reading.
The same unjustified concession is made when looking back on the worldwide lockdowns in March 2020: our leaders and their advisers meant well. The truth is that a very similar mindset was at work as characterises Woke, and most of what happened in the ensuing two years was preplanned (in dummy runs from ‘Dark Winter’ to ‘Event 201’). The last dummy run was just three months ago: ‘Catastrophic Contagion: A Global Challenge Exercise’, preparing for the next pandemic. If Toby took the time to read The Real Dr Fauci – it’s long and dense – I think he would find himself disabused.
There are no unintended consequences. All the dire consequences of woke are intentional. It seemed obvious that male prisoners would identify as female so they could go into women’s prisons and that is exactly what happened. Also it was obvious the same thing would happen with female changing room.
Large numbers of children are being mutilated in the name of trans ideology.
WOKE IS EVIL
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Gotta do something about “Wokingham”. The name sounds much too “woke”, lol.
“Woke” was born supposedly out of an awareness of social injustices. But as with environmentalism it morphed into a greater and greater need to oppose absolutely everything. In the environmental movement, as governments started to agree with genuine environmental issues, the environmental movement had to get more and more extreme in their demands, in order to oppose establishment and to still be relevant. As my old gran used to say, “Give them an inch and they take a mile”. So, in the wokery religious movement that uses intolerance in the name of tolerance, more and more demands are met and out of worship and sometimes fear, governments and corporations buckle in the hope they will be left alone. But wokey will NEVER leave anyone alone. Even if you cover your head in thorns and wear sackcloth and repent your white privilege it won’t be enough. ————White people don’t like the idea of being called “racist” and don’t wokes know it. So, if white people say they are “not racist”, all this means is that they obviously are. So, they keep battering you with their anti-racist hammer. Just as religious zealots think everyone not subscribing to their religion think all are sinners, wokes demand you repent and come fully on board with all their equality diversity race gender and climate tyranny that leaves no space for personal opinion, otherwise you are a heretic.—-The Church of Wokery started from humble beginnings but is now the biggest secular religion in the western world.—————–Only if you sit burning dung in the third world with no electricity might you be spared.
well put, Varmint, stay free to object, and refuse to stay quiet.
I’ve occasionally adjusted my prejudices, some times this way and some times the other, but I’m striving to treat everybody as the kind of person he is. I don’t care who calls me what because of this. The privilege-test is Have you ever collected returnable bottles because you were hungry? I have.
BTW, people burning dung during cause cancer. They’re still in the early stages of universal condemnation but will arrive at They’re killing the planet! in due time.
These people have never been hungry, never been cold, never had to fetch water, empty night soil or walk down the garden or yard in the freezing night to a toilet, never worn hand me downs…… But as you say, they soon will.
Ain’t that the truth!
“White people don’t like the idea of being called “racist” and don’t wokes know it. So, if white people say they are “not racist”, all this means is that they obviously are. So, they keep battering you with their anti-racist hammer.”
A classic Kafka trap if there ever was one.
Also works with the word “colorblind”, or “I don’t see color”, something the wokey wokesters hate even more when white people call themselves it. So ridiculous.
Man is a pack animal, therefore within its pack, tribe, society there is a pecking order, established over time for the survival of that society. Societies are made up of factions, and sections which can be identified, sub-grouped, or totally segregated as in multiculturalism where you are no longer a society but an individual. The perfect divide and conquer action, where the individuals fight amongst themselves and let the state do as it pleases without attention of the masses. eg. Net zero, and climate.
Man has developed as a entity throughout history when debate and discussion have been allowed to flourish. When strict theological order has been implemented we see a social stagnation we refer to as the dark ages, where whatever is ordained by the elite is deem good with no discussion for balance or reflection. Good is not always good in itself as without a balance of some bad it can become bad with the intension of being good. In a philosophical sense altruism may be a good thing to strive for, but in a zoological sense it is a potential for disaster.
The significance of the drive to multiculturalism has highlighted the insignificance of the individual and will only favour the state, as it was meant to be. The majority of society understand the significance of their insignificance as an individual within society, and use debate and communication to keep this significance alive. To close down debate and drive a multicultural/ fractured society will reduce society to the insignificance of the individual, under the thumb of the state, just where they want you. Totally subservient.
“Woke” = sleepwalking into tyranny
Coercing people into agreeing with you is NOT an attitude that can be considered to be having “good intentions”