CxD #227: Hatred toward the Queen; Antidote to Hatred; Wokeness, its history, aims and abuses
1. A professor reacted to Queen Elizabeth’s death like so:
2. There’s a better way, Dr. Anya. And it’s better because it doesn’t confuse righteousness for doing whatever it takes to make things better for everyone, not worse. And that always means not wishing excruciating pain on someone.
3. I’ve made the same mistake of righteous anger and indignation and hatred before and it’s an ugly and harmful state to be in; I was convinced of my rightness, which in turn blinded me to the anguish and suffering of others, the complex causes and conditions at play, and created enemies out of fellow beings sharing the same home planet.
What’s more troubling for me about the above tweet is that the author has a large audience and is posting under the rubric of equality, across race, gender, and identity. Her virtue is an actual flag she’s waving, but her message is one of categorical hatred. Help me find a better word that’s not “hypocrite.”
Confusing the fight for equality and an end to systematic oppression with hatred is a terrible and devastating confusion.
4. I hope, therefore, that this oldie but goodie will help:
5. The essay below is one of the more balanced and reflective attempts at understanding “wokeness” that I’ve yet read. It’s really worth your time if you care about the social morass we are stuck in.
A few of the passages that resonated the most for me:
For Black people, the Great Awokening has been more about material concerns, especially police brutality and the persistent income/wealth gap. But there’s also a deep sense in which many Black people feel disrespected, which has to do with history. A lot of Black Americans feel that the history of the bad things this country did to their ancestors is not sufficiently recognized or highlighted in politics and popular culture. And wokeness, with its focus on history, is in part an attempt to fill that lacuna.
And for women, a big part of the Woke Era has been about respect in the workplace. The 90s backlash against sexual harassment made some headway, but many men were still in the habit of talking about sex to their female coworkers in a way that made it clear that they thought of those coworkers as sex objects. And that is a deep and grating lack of respect.
Thus, I think wokeness is in part an attempt to renegotiate the distribution of respect in American society. So many of the things we associate with wokeness — pronoun culture, “canceling” writers who appear to traffic in stereotypes, re-centering American history around Black people, the whole idea of “centering the voices of marginalized groups”, and so on — are explicitly about respect. Wokeness does include social movements with real material aims (e.g. defunding the police), but mostly it’s a cultural movement whose goal is to change the way Americans talk and think about each other.
So when I wrote about redistributing respect, I had the right idea; I just totally missed the dimensions along which the demands for respect would come.
But actually, I think my post had one additional huge, fatal flaw. I framed it as a question of redistribution, as if respect is a zero-sum quantity. That was a mischaracterization; respect is something that you can produce more or less of, in the aggregate.
Will telling White people that they’re stinky dog/ape chimeras or groveling goblins make our society a better one? I mean, maybe you could argue that White people need to be insulted and kicked around a bit in order to force them to get off their high horse and empathize with groups they’ve traditionally disrespected, and that eventually this will lead to a more respectful society all around. Maybe if White people are forced to spend a decade or two as penitents, walking around with their heads bowed, thinking “I’m a stinky dog-person!”, we can reset American society on a more universally respectful footing afterwards?
I don’t think it works that way. Instead, I think what we’ll get is just a society with an even lower aggregate level of respect. For one thing, White people will continue to be drawn to ever-crazier backlash movements. But even more importantly, when society becomes accustomed to the use of targeted disrespect as a praxis for social change, that weapon will become universal. American society will become even more of a war of all against all, with fights over material resources, status, or other scarce quantities manifesting via ever-greater heapings of scorn and belittlement. You don’t need White people, or men, in order to have those fights.
Instead, we need to recognize that respect is not a conserved, limited quantity. You can make as much of it as you like. It’s possible to have a society where everyone gets treated like trash, and it’s possible to have a society where no one gets treated like trash.
We should be thinking hard about how to bring about the latter.
But even though wokeness is American as apple pie, its quasi-religious nature raises an important question: How can people push back effectively against its excesses?
Because even though there was a reason for its reemergence, wokeness does have plenty of excesses. The next post in this series will go into those in greater detail, but they’re numerous enough — the identification of positive traits like hard work and progress with whiteness, inappropriate cultural gatekeeping, creepy and potentially counterproductive corporate training sessions, San Francisco school board members saying inappropriate things, stupid performative crap of various kinds, the errors in the 1619 Project, and so on and so forth. I’m not about to join James Lindsay and the anti-wokes; I view woke overreach as an annoyance rather than a crisis at this point, and there are much bigger problems in America. But the existence of these excesses does raise the question of how reasonable, sober-minded Americans can push back, to keep them from growing out of hand.
The more a movement is animated by the burning inner light of faith, the harder it is to criticize it. Not only does faith not admit even the smallest criticism in the intellectual sense, but it often summons a rapid and militant reaction when criticized. Just ask any of the people who fought to keep conservative Christianity out of public schools in small Southern towns in the 1980s and 90s!
“Religion” shouldn’t be an epithet, but it is true that religious and quasi-religious movements are very tough to deal with in the public sphere. Separation of church and state gave America a bit of institutional pretext to restrain the power of political Christianity, but wokeness has no church, and there is nothing to separate it from the state. The same force of belief that makes wokeness so powerful in pushing through social and cultural changes will lead to bruising, exhausting political battles in America for decades to come.
Thank you so much for this! I love the simple concept that woke-ness is a redistribution of respect AND the idea that respect is not a limited commodity.
- Barbara