What is Wokeness?
Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters Episode 23
(Chapter Headings: Introduction)
Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. Today’s topic, what is wokeness?
(Chapter Headings: SJW)
Wokeness is the state of being woke but what do we mean by “woke”? The answer to that is it depends on the context wherein the term is used. For instance, there are those who complain about movies and television being woke. Those people, when operating in good faith, pretty clearly use the term “woke” as an adjective meaning “obnoxiously and insufferably left-wing.” This functionally makes “woke” a synonym for SJW. After all, not too long ago, the kinds of people who complained about works of fiction being obnoxiously and insufferably left-wing tended to refer to those media as SJW. For instance, people who disliked how the movie The Last Jedi handled its political messaging referred to it as an “SJW” film. Of course, SJW, an acronym for Social Justice Warrior, was also sometimes used to refer to people. Social Justice Warrior was a pejorative term for an easily offended and obnoxiously opinionated left-wing activist. (The Foundation for Economic Education has a good article on How the Term ‘Social Justice Warrior’ Became an Insult (linked here) but I’m not going to get into that in this Matitya’s Musing.) My thoughts on SJW fiction are that a work of fiction can have a political message and still be good and that this remains the case even when the message is left-wing. The issue arises, when delivering the message takes precedence over other aspects of the story and thus undermines good storytelling. I discussed that point in my book review of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and I see little reason to revisit that topic further.
(Chapter Headings: Critical Theory)
That said, there are critics of wokeness who view being woke as taking a specific political stance. For instance, the pro-Trump political commentator Bethany Mandel has repeatedly criticised the Left for its wokeness. Indeed, Mandel devoted an entire chapter of her book, co-written with Karol Markowicz, to critiquing wokeness. Predictably, when the Far Left political commentator Briahna Joy Gray interviewed Mandel about her book, Gray asked Mandel to define woke. Mandel struggled to define “woke” and her critics on the Internet mocked her to shreds for her failure. Only, Mandel hadn’t truly failed. She struggled to come up with a response, which is bad optics, but she ultimately offered a definition. Mandel said “ It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally re-imagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression”. That definition could have been better worded (the theory Mandel was referencing is actually about viewing society through the lens of structures of oppression, not about creating them) but imagining society as “hierarchies of oppression” is an entirely legitimate definition of wokeness. It is a description of, what I would call, Critical Theory. Simplifying to the extreme, Critical Theory is “any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures.” (It was created by Western Marxist intellectuals at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in an effort to bring culture more in line with Karl Marx’s ideas through non-violent means. I’ll get to more of that in my Matitya’s Musing on Critical Theory.) So, per Mandel, to be woke is to believe in the tenets of Critical Theory.
(Chapter Headings: The Paradox of Tolerance)
Is Critical Theory the sole thing that critics of wokeness use “woke” to mean? No. Like I said in my Matitya’s Musing defining the Far Left, “the Leftist online personality Destiny made a video, titled Wokeness Has Gone Too Far | CHANGE MY MIND, wherein he defines wokeness as using the “Paradox of Tolerance” to justify efforts at demonising and deplatforming those who run afoul of Progressive groupthink.” As a result, his definition of wokeness is remarkably close to what I would call cancel culture. My thoughts on that subject is that there are people, like Nick Fuentes and his ilk, who say things that are (or should be) completely beyond the pale and people like that genuinely should be cancelled. The problem is that cancel culture can be (and often is) taken to such an extreme that it becomes toxic and counterproductive. (In other words, wokeness has gone too far.) I’ll have more to say about that should I ever write a Matitya’s Musing about cancel culture. For our purposes right now, it’s enough to say that “cancel culture” is an acceptable definition of wokeness.
(Chapter Headings: Critical Race Theory)
The libertarian political commentator Ben Shapiro, in his debate with Destiny, provided the following definition. Shapiro said
“Wokeism has its roots in postmodernism, which essentially suggests that every principle is a reflection of underlying structures of power and that therefore any inequality that emerges under such a system is a reflection, again, of that structure of power. That used to be applied in, sort of, Marxist ways. The suggestion being that economic inequality was the result of misallocation of power in a structure preserved by an upper crust of people who wanted to cram down exploitation on people. And that got transmuted into, sort of, a racial version of postmodernism in which the systems of the United States are white supremacist in orientation and are perpetuated by a group of people who are, in fact, in favour of the preservation of white power and white supremacy. That is the generalised theory of Critical Race Theory as proposed by, for example, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, in their book on Critical Race Theory. ”
I’d define Critical Race Theory now but, after the Shapiro quote, doing so would be redundant. I will add that Critical Race Theory originated as a racially focused variant of Critical Theory such that Shapiro’s definition of wokeness is included in Mandel’s definition.
(Chapter Headings: Left-wing politics)
While Shapiro has provided a good definition of wokeness, his colleagues at the Daily Wire have not. Michael Knowles, while criticising the phrase “woke Right”, posited “the ambiguity of ‘woke Right’ follows from the ambiguity of ‘woke’, a term which became popular mostly so that liberals on the Right could distinguish — implausibly, in my view — between liberalism, which they consider good, and leftism, which they consider bad.” Knowles is wrong about that. The “woke Right” means people on the Right who imitate the excesses of the Left. There is no ambiguity. Nonetheless, Knowles isn’t the sole Rightist to have this view. His colleague Matt Walsh responded to Mandel’s controversial struggle to define wokeness by positing that wokeness is simply another word for left-wing politics. Per Walsh, to be left-wing is to be woke and to be woke is to be left-wing. Walsh views right-wingers who use the term “woke” as being too generous to the Left. (It’s how Walsh justifies continuing to view J.K. Rowling as woke, for example.) Unlike the earlier examples I gave, Walsh and Knowles do not provide a serviceable definition of wokeness. The fact is, intellectually serious critics of wokeness don’t use “woke” as a generic term for the Left.
(Chapter Headings: Political Correctness)
Speaking of intellectually serious anti-woke commentators, Jonah Goldberg wrote a piece for The Dispatch titled Hitting Rewind on ‘Woke’ wherein Goldberg says that he agrees with quite a lot of Conservative complaints about wokeness because they’re essentially the same as the Conservative critiques that were offered against political correctness in the 1990s and Goldberg agrees with those critiques. Per Goldberg,
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“ It’s weird that I feel compelled to say “woke” is a real thing. But because many on the right have made it the new enemy ideology, many on the left feel compelled to say it’s all made up or is simply code for racism. At the same time, I do not believe that “wokeness” is the novel and sinister threat that many on the right say it is. And I think it distorts our politics and conservative doctrine to pretend that it is. ‘New threats require new responses’ is the thinking on the right these days because it gives the champions of the new responses an excuse to abandon traditional arguments that are perfectly suited to combating wokeness, by any name.
Oh, I believe wokeness can be sinister, but it also can be harmless, silly, ridiculous, or, in some instances, perfectly fine. Like political correctness before it, some attempts to treat people with respect are entirely defensible, even if they seem unsettling.
Speaking of political correctness, I didn’t like that term either, but it was a real thing too. In fact, it was mostly the same thing as wokeness.
For the original adopters of the term, being woke meant being aware of racial or social injustice.
The original meaning of political correctness derived from Marxism, and referred to holding the official, approved, positions of the Soviet Communist Party. Following the “party line” was synonymous with being politically correct.
Starting in the 1980s the term was revived to convey sensitivity to minorities, marginal groups, social justice concerns, etc.
Amusingly, before political correctness, the terms “cultural sensitivity,” “social justice,” and “multicultural,” all served more or less the same function that woke plays today — for the left.
And, guess what? Such terms played more or less the same role for the right then as woke does now. Cranky [right-wingers] — at times, me included — would gripe about political correctness, social justice, [and] cultural sensitivity as an effort to force us into taking positions we did not hold.”
Goldberg is right.
(Chapter Headings: Conclusion)
So, what do opponents of wokeness mean by “woke”?
1) Obnoxiously and insufferably left-wing (aka SJW)
2) Viewing society through the lens of structures of oppression (aka Critical Theory)
3) Using the Paradox of Tolerance to justify efforts at the demonization and deplatforming of whomever is deemed politically controversial, usually by the Left (aka Cancel Culture)
4) Viewing society almost exclusively through the lens of racial power (aka Critical Race Theory)
5) Left-wing
6) Politically correct
You can tell from context which of the above definitions an anti-woke person is using.
My name is Matitya and this has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.
