Woke — wreaking harm on the oppressed

Noelle Mering...wokeism is a thin ideology that harms rather than heals. Photo: Source

"Wokeness is a movement for justice but when you really understand what the internal logic of the movement is, I find it to be alarming," says author and Washington D.C. think tank member Noelle Mering. "It is fundamentally something that weakens people far more than it helps, and particularly the people it claims to want to help."

Mering lays bare the intellectual structure of the movement in her book out last year Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. In a video on the topic, she says that while the term "woke" refers to being alert and attuned to the layers of oppression in society surrounding the hot issues of today—race, sex, and gender—the underlying idea has a long history.

 "It is really a reformulation of old ideas and old roads that various countries have gone down," nodding to the various experiments in Communist countries based on the materialist and coercive stance of Marxism.

It's more than just a political movement, it's actually a spiritual movement before anything else. So the history of the movement is really important to understand.

You can [find] it in the Garden of Eden with a snake cajoling the first woman to be that she wants - you can be as gods. But if we want [...] a starting point in more modern times most people point to Karl Marx. [However], it's important also to understand who Marx was influenced by, and this is a philosopher named Hegel.

Hegel is important to understand because he started the engine of the modern progressive movement which he called the dialectic. [This ...] was just this idea that history is a movement of progression towards a utopian end and that progress through history comes through the engine of revolution, which is built around an idea manifesting itself in the [...] political state in particular.

"Then that [moment of progress] will have contradictions and those contradictions have to be worked out and worked through. You get a new state and then that state has its own contradictions. You keep cycling and synthesizing in history until you reach utopia. Marx was captivated by this new thing in philosophy called the dialectic. 

But he was a strict materialist whereas Hegel was thinking that this is a rational movement. Marx said no, there is nothing beyond the material, the material world is all that is. So there is this dialectic, this engine throughout time reaching a utopia but it's a utopia built purely on economic terms with every person being defined as either an oppressor or an oppressed, working class proletariat or ruling class, and that this is where the revolution would happen and that the revolution was inevitable. 

Then came post-modernism, which basically identified language as being an avenue for power and, therefore, we [are] able to manipulate words. In manipulating our language we can manipulate the interior life of a community because once we no longer can communicate clearly and understand that our words are connected to reality, then they become tools that we can wound each other with or that we can just destabilize our community with them.

Then intersectionality came and further [turned] attention on 'oppressive identity'. With this, we really had the birth of identity politics. [This] was late 80s early 90s and it crystallized [as a] movement. 

The presuppositions are all built on Hegel, Marx, Freudianism and the Frankfurt School [of philosophers]."

For Freud, reality lies off stage or out of consciousness and that each person was on a continuum of sanity and madness.  As for the Frankfurt School, Britannica.com states:

The members of the Frankfurt School tried to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy but which also utilized the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. They used basic Marxist concepts to analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems. This approach, which became known as “critical theory,” yielded influential critiques of large corporations and monopolies, the role of technology, the industrialization of culture, and the decline of the individual within capitalist society.

Mering continues: 

This is what we see now. This is Marx's march through history, the progression into a future utopia that is constantly supposed to be working itself out in time with rejection of everything that came before. It is the culmination of all of those presuppositions until now.

Marx said that the greatest obstacles to revolution are the faith [in God] and the family. Why this is, I think, is because the faith gives people a context for their suffering rather than marinate in the inequality or the cross of our life.

We're actually told to embrace that cross, that we can find real meaning and real nobility in suffering. No revolution is born out of people suffering well in dire circumstances. A revolution is born out of people who are enraged by their circumstances and feel inadequate and helpless to transcend them.

So once you are weakened to the point where you feel that you have no power, no possibility, then the only answer left logically is to fight the system, destroy the system, [...] and hope that some new utopia will come from that.

I think the average student at a college, university, or even your nice woke Aunt Susan or your neighbor, they are not steeped in Hegel; they don't consider themselves Marxists, and this is part of where the confusion lies.

[Wokeism] is ostensibly a movement just for justice, and who doesn't want justice? It's a movement to fight racism... Every person of good will, every normal reasonable person wants to fight racism.

All of these are deeply Christian claims. Christians are supposed to be people of justice, supposed to be people fighting against injustice. The fact, the reality that most people would not consider themselves Marxist but have adopted so many of the conclusions of this movement is just a sign of how pervasive and how ubiquitous the movement has become.

It's the water in which we swim, it's the air that we breathe, it's in our movies, it's in the way we frame narratives, it's in media, it's in politics, it's in the academy - rampantly so - and so all of these things coalesce to create a default way of thinking, a filter upon which we see the world without even realizing that we're necessarily looking through a filter at it all.

In some ways it's a sort of spinoff the C.S. Lewis book, The Screwtape Letters,  where [there is] that famous line that the greatest power of the devil is that he can convince you he doesn't exist and, therefore, you're at his mercy, beholden to his power in a way that you might not have been had you been able to identify what was happening.

The woke movement is similar to that with regard to its presuppositions, and that the greatest power this ideological filter has over us is that we don't realize that we're looking through a filter at all. We just think that this is the way that you see reality.

A lot of Catholics and Christians feel that Christ would have fought side by side with people for racial justice or he would have fought against lecherous men, and for women who want to feel that they have true dignity and aren't instruments of someone else's pleasure.

Those are true Christian precepts and Christ would have been on the side of justice in those matters, but the thing that this ideology does is... it's a truly deformed ideology in that it takes partial truths and totalizes them and in that totalization it presents something that is a lie because it creates the [view that] the only way to look at the world is through this lens of power and domination.

It defines a human person differently than what the Christian vision of what a human person is. The Christian vision of the human person is that we're defined on universals. We're rational animals just based on Aristotelian logic, but also through revelation we know that we are called to be sons and daughters of a loving Father; that we are defined in relationship to God; we're defined by love itself, love himself.

Defined by the hatred of man and society 

The woke could define a person very differently and incompatibly, so for the woke, the person is not defined by the love of God but by the hatred of man or hatred of society.

For example, to be a woman is not just to be a woman in any sort of  traditional sense. There's a bodily meaning there, and there's certain spiritual symbolism.

But to be a woman for the woke is to be fundamentally fighting the oppression that's at the core of your being. For example, in 2017 there was the first women's march and there was a group of pro-life feminists who were co-sponsoring the march. But when the organizers got wind that they were pro-life they said, "Oh, well, you can march with us but you cannot have any official affiliation with us."[The pro-life women] were confused and they said, "But we support the dignity of women. We want to fight for similar goals. We overlap in certain areas, and this is not just a pro-abortion march, it's a pro-women's march..."

But the thing we have to understand about the ideology is that it's not about supporting the person in the oppressed group, it's about supporting the person in the pressure group who supports the ideology. So it's really empowering the ideology not empowering the human being. So it's not enough to be a woman, you have to be an ideological woman, you have to be a politicized woman.

We hear the same thing echoed with Nicole Hannah Jones, the author of the [New York Times'] "1619 project" who famously said, "We all know there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black". That [means] it's simply not enough to be a black person you have to be supporting our agenda in order to be considered.

So it's not actually about diversity it's about uniformity of thought, but with different people, representatives of different groups, embracing and affirming that uniformity.

One important thing we need to pay attention to is the way in which words can sound innocuous to our ears because most people translate them into something reasonable, but for the movement it's far more radical.

A good example of that is the word "equity", which sounds like something that's oriented around justice and equality. But equity for the movement means equity of outcome, that all outcomes should be equal, despite effort, despite merit, despite any other factor that might weigh in on disparate outcomes.

So, according to the ideology, if you see that there is an inequitable outcome you can attribute it to only one thing, either racism or sexism or some other type of social oppression.

What this does is it eliminates the possibility of any sort of measure, any sort of metric. So, for example, [in] the new woke math, they'll say two plus two can equal five if it equals five in someone's lived experience. 

It seems like it can't be a serious proposition but the ideological reason for that is that all standards have to be eradicated, even the ones that are as undeniable as a simple mathematic equation that every person understands.

The reason is because we have to attribute all outcomes, all of our successes, all of our failures to systemic forces outside of ourselves. Our failures are not ours to own and learn from, our successes are not ours to claim and grow with.

There's a truth to that because people do have disadvantages and people do have advantages over others. But there's no state power or force that can equalize all those things. This is the human situation.

Our successes do not originate completely in us. Obviously anything good that comes out of us is first and foremost attributable to God, and it's just our cooperation with him that brings any good in the world from us.

So there's a truth that they're speaking to, but rather than using it to point to the love of God and the power of God, rather it is only an indication of the evil of society.

The fact that some people might merit something that others don't is attributed to the systemic forces and the systemic forces have to be eradicated.

Other people have spoken on this, notably Jordan Peterson, [on this view that] all of humankind, in any society, is going to end up with some sort of hierarchical structure.

Every Marxist country that has tried to establish a society based on those principles ends up becoming tyrannical and that's inevitable based on the presuppositions.

But if you're going to end up in some sort of hierarchical system no matter what, the most fair way to establish that is through merit. I know it's easy to make merit into a cartoon where people say "Oh just pull your yourselves up by the bootstraps", without any recognition that people do start life in situations that they need help.

They're vulnerable, they're at risk, there are incredible hardships, and we can't just give them a good pep talk and say get on your way.

We really need to have solidarity [with people] as Catholics. But the problem is that if you read any biography of any person who was born into incredibly difficult circumstances and somehow was able to transcend those circumstances, what it was it that made the difference, it was someone in their life telling them to control what was within their control, to take responsibility, to not marinate in the injustices that they're born into but rather to see what they can do that can pull themselves out.

You see this in the biography of Ben Carson [eminent surgeon, presidential candidate, Afro-American]. His grandmother used to recite a poem to him called "Mr Nobody", and it was something along the lines of—when something's gone wrong and you've got no one to blame, you can blame Mr Nobody.

The point of this lesson was just that blame is going to get you nowhere [when] you've been dealt a hard hand. But that mindset [of blame] is going to exacerbate your circumstances and we would never tell someone that in any type of other situation. 

Mering points out that in leadership, if you're mentoring someone,  you would never tell someone to point their finger at everyone else in when something goes wrong.

You want the person who's going to say, "The buck stops with me. I'm going to take some initiative and I'm going to grow and I'm going to change. I'm going to see what I can do to make things better and be positive."

But for some reason we've decided that we can tell a whole generation that the way they move through life is the exact opposite way to that which is going to lead to their actual flourishing in life.

Is dialogue possible? 

Knowing how to engage with someone who is woke can be challenging because in some ways the movement is not oriented around dialogue. It's sort of oriented around intimidation.

There's a lot of manipulation that happens with language and I think it's important to know when it's not going to be a fruitful conversation and you want to just say, "I love you. Let's not go down this road."

So there's a certain amount of prudence that comes into the equation: Is this a person that I can actually have a dialogue with, and if it's not then it can only create more division and more tension to try to do something that this combination of people are up for.

But there will be other people who are more open to having a real conversation with whom we might feel that this is something worthwhile to talk about.

I talk to parents a lot who are saying, "My kids came home and they are woke now, and they're challenging me".

It's important to know that this is, in some ways, a phase. It might not be something they adopt lifelong.

There are real woke ideologues out there who have fully embraced the movement but there's also a lot of people who are just parroting a script they've been handed. It hasn't really penetrated into their soul and that's when we have to realize that there is a deeper human longing that people have.

It's a longing that won't be satisfied by a thin ideology that has to be propped up by coercion, by silencing, by fear and by manipulation. It's a longing that can only be fulfilled by the fullness of truth, a willingness to embrace the truth no matter where it leads you: scientific truth, philosophical truth, theological truth, and most of all, the truth of who we are in relationship to a loving God and loving Father.

What the human heart longs for, and it's something that cannot be fulfilled by ideology... and we have to feel confidence in the fact that every human person is longing for the exact same thing.

Every revolutionary wants to target the father, and there's something deeply spiritual happening, because when we think of authority now, right authority or or even fatherhood, the role of the father our minds immediately go to is tyrannical domination.

It's been such an effective demonization of the image of a father ,but if you talk to someone they know what a good father should be, they know, even if they didn't experience it, that a good father is not there to control them but actually to empower them to lead their lives independently.

They know a good father is gentle, but also strong. We have so corrupted the image of the father in a way to corrupt our understanding of who God is because God is the father, and he's not a father because he's like a human father. Human fathers are more fatherly in so far as they're more like him.

Women become vulnerable 

Fatherhood really is a window into who God is, so the revolutionaries were correct in that by targeting the father you really dismantle society from the inside out.

They wrote about men needing to become licentious, to become slaves to their desires. That was part of our "liberation". However, our true liberation is through combating groups outside of ourselves, but our liberation is also through combating our own internal desire or instinct, to repress our desires.

[For revolutionaries] our liberation was in part of our embracing every desire, particularly ones that were transgressive [of moral boundaries], and this was a real target with regards men.

What happens once a man's moral authority is eroded is that women become vulnerable because there is a way in which men are called to be providers and protectors, and once women become vulnerable they tend to become calloused. The sexual revolution targeted them and it encouraged them to engage in all sorts of relationships and in activities that women really have to callous themselves to engage in.

It's hardened a lot of women because they have felt used and have felt they weren't cared for. The deeper part of what's happening is that the revolution manipulated this societal pathology.

It encouraged men to become licentious, to become weak,  and then it pointed to the abuse, the inevitable abuse, and disruption that happened between men and women, and said, "You see, this is further evidence that we need to smash the patriarchy. Men are bad, so let's condemn men as a whole as being bad." 

It's suggesting that the cure is the exact thing that caused the problem, that [going further in] rejecting true masculinity is the way that we're going to get out of this whole thing of having eradicated what real masculinity is.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says that to be emasculated is to be a slave to pleasure to the point where you're no longer willing to suffer to be a real man. There is some connection between suffering and the true masculinity that society needs and families need.

We're going to have to fight this movement on multiple levels and it's already happening far more than we often realize. There are people building up new institutions, there are more and more parents seeing through this, and we see on our school boards there's a resistance happening that's very grassroots and hopeful.

There's a thinness to the ideology that is becoming transparent now people are seeing it affect their kids in such bad ways.

It seems fundamentally like a justice movement that's actually more unjust than it is just.

But we have to fundamentally see this as a spiritual battle and and fight it on that level. This is a spiritual battle and we have to be arming ourselves for that fight.

The first thing I usually suggest to people is to [...] get some clarity about what is happening because there's a shape-shifting of how the movement presents itself, and there's a manipulation of language that happens that can be really confusing.

The movement really tries to operate on that sort of confusion and capitalize on it and exploit it with those good Christian precepts [of justice, care for the weak and minorities] and then supplanting them with a bunch of ideology that you have to accept.

So the more clarity that we have then the more we will feel confident in resisting it and not falling for these types of tricks.

Fundamentally, we have to have courage. It's a movement that can't be resisted on the fringes. One person resisting or two people or a handful of people —that's a fringe group. But galvanizing whole coalitions of people to resist it, that's something to contend with and that's the way we find it within companies and within counties and even within our country as a whole.

That type of clarity can imbue us with a sort of courage that can really give us the confidence to simply and plainly call out a lie. The greatest threat to a lie is some people, someone, simply and plainly saying the truth.

It feels like it's Goliath at the moment, but Goliath can be brought to his knees far more easily than we might think, and that thought can give us a lot of hope in this fight.

Ω Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of the book,  Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (2021)  She is an editor for the website Theology of Home and a coauthor of the books Theology of Home and Theology of Home II .  She writes on culture, politics, and religion. Mering has an MA in philosophy and is a wife and mother of six children in Southern California. 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.