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| Wokeism's fabricated world of unreality. Photo by Kristina Nor |
The belief that each person has the wherewithal to be autonomous—as opposed to being limited in intellectual capacity and moral insight—has blighted the West's ability to make progress in justice and peace.
That belief has given rise over the past few centuries to a certain ideology that is now bearing the fruit of fractured societies and individual misery, even as it pushes itself deeper into the governing institutions and completes its capture of the social elite of academia, large parts of the political system and government, the mainstream media, and such leading sectors as education, and the corporate world. This ideology, based on Marxist concepts of a solely material world and dictatorship by an elite, is what we have come to refer to as wokeism—or wokeness, if you prefer. (See definitions at the end.)
An awareness of the character of this "ideology" that governs the West, and which is being promoted by Western evangelists around the world, is critical if societies are to regain the equilibrium that the West's Christian heritage had offered until the Reformation's doctrine of sola scriptura fomented the view that every Jack or Jill is as capable of interpreting God's word as any spiritual authority that the Church as a whole represented, creating a "subjective and individualistic" view of life.
All this is brought into focus by a well-reasoned essay titled "Ideology has poisoned the West" published in a refreshing source of countercultural thought, the online magazine Unherd.
In this essay, author and academic at the budding University of Austin (Texas), Jacob Howland, writes that "ideology" has earned itself a connotation of something distasteful within the political arena. He presents this contrast:
In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech.
[...] speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.
But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them [humans] only as groups to be acted upon.
The origin of the term under scrutiny is revealing:
The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule.
To Western victims of this spiritual virus, we can add countries elsewhere under dictatorships of a similarly materialistic and technocratic nature, such as China and Vietnam.The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.
The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as “the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for”. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.
The roots of the intellectual and political regime societies are increasingly suffering under tells us a lot about the nature of the course being pursued by elites in Western societies:
Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.
Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of God’s creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.
From the beginning, we observe how "an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation":
The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives.
In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. [...] But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.
Howland draws several conclusions:
Ideology’s most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the “Totalitarianism Lite” of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.
Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called “mute coercion”. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.
Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of “victims” and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of “oppressors”. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme — denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists — must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.
Western societies are on the road to greater misery, Howland predicts, because the intellectual and spiritual regime that has gained sway lacks "an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy".
The takeaway is that the fantasy world of wokeism must be opposed and rejected at every opportunity. The common good relies on individuals and groups who are willing to display conviction and courage in the face of the distorted values and manipulated standards of virtue promulgated by those seeking meaning and purpose in the power-hungry realm of the woke.
💢 Read the full essay here
💢 Read also:
Woke censorship in publishing, here, and here.
Success in battle against woke lawyers. See here.
💢 Definitions of "wokeness" from UrbanDictionary.com
[] The ability of someone to become outraged at imagined enemies and create ways to be the victim, even though you're insanely privileged.
[] If anyone disagrees or is not extreme enough, then they deserve to be cancelled. Wokeness or wokeism is a cult based on neo-Marxism and post-modernism.
[] Performative wokeness: People who more concerned with self-promotion, social media "likes", or selling books & lectures than they are about actual deliverables.
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