Wokeism under increased scrutiny

Herbert Marcuse, social theorist, and Angela David, political activist — cooperative change out; political compulsion in.

Woke thought erupted upon the Western world abruptly, making an impact only when most branches of cultural influence and power had surrendered to its authority. In the United States, it was clearly in play with the 2020 riots following the death in police custody of  George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

Of course, the philosophy termed Critical Theory, of which Wokeism is the praxis, had long taken hold in the universities of the West, becoming fashionable within the academic community, thereby convincing a generation of graduates who have since become the cultural elite that there are new rules that must apply (!) in conducting themselves in social relationships. 

A penetrating discussion on the roots of the attempted cultural revolution underway in many parts of the world—but not all—occurs in a video just out in which Chris Rufo discusses his new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, with Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, whose study of the "new wave" philosophy shows how aggressively opposed it is to the great body of experience of what is needed for human flourishing expressed in Catholic Social Teaching.

The discussion starts with scrutiny of the history of the philosophical origins of Wokeism, a better term than Wokeness, which suggests a quality of thought or practice, and which doesn't do justice to the ambitions of what is clearly a hardline neo-Marxism. The full discussion is enlightening and practical. The following portion has been lightly edited.  

Rufo: [What] really confuses people is that woke ideology, or left-wing racialist ideology, operates at two levels. There's a level of euphemism, all of which sound very nice – diversity, equity inclusion, justice, solidarity sometimes —-  but if you dig under the euphemisms, which are marketing words, you find an ideology that is very different.

It doesn't stem from the Christian tradition, it doesn't stem from the natural rights tradition, it doesn't stem from the traditional mid-century (1960s) civil rights movement. 

Barron: It's against all those things.

Rufo: Yes, it's against all of those things and so you have to do your homework, you have to understand where it comes from. Where it comes from is, most prominently Marxism or neo-Marxism. You have someone like Herbert Marcuse, you have the black radical tradition, which is an atheist tradition, and the militant revolutionary push that sought to overturn the system of government in the United States. 

Then you have this ugly brew of post-modernism and gender theory that seeks to erase the very basic fabric of the cosmos. It rejects the world of creation in favor of a world of unlimited human manipulation. What I've tried to do with the book is essentially to say let's look at the euphemisms, but let's look underneath them to find what's really happening.

Barron: Do you find some of that neo-gnostic— the oldest heresy in the church that keeps asserting itself century in and century out with the view that the real me is hidden deep in there somewhere and the body is malleable, the body can be changed according to the whims of the real inner self. Of course the church recognized very early on—go back to Saint Irenaeus in the second century—that that's repugnant to a Christian or biblical anthropology. Do you find some of that neo-gnostic in form?

Rufo: Definitely, and I think it's most pronounced on gender because politics is largely driven in the United States by the left on race issues. That's the great mechanism by which they feel they can change the structures of society, the economy, the law, the Constitution. But there's a separate strain that has a separate lineage and we think of it as Gender Theory, we think of it as the trans activism and that's very much predicated on the rejection of any concept of human nature. Human nature is what they call a kind of normative structure, it's part of the sexual normativity that is an oppressive structure that's created by human invention. 

They actually believe that they can manipulate the physical world, the biological world, to meet any ideological demand. Men can become women, men can become pregnant. Whatever kind of such phrases you might have heard are based on this idea of a rejection of any natural limits and using technology to transcend not just the categories of male and female, which are you know embedded in the human experience, actually in our biology all the way down.

Gender, if you look at it from a scientific account, if you look at it from a Biblical account…but they actually think they can transcend the limitation of human nature as such. So it's a movement that is at the end of the day an anti-human movement. A lot of the reporting I've done recently is looking at where this leads in medical practice and you have some surgical procedures that they're doing that are far beyond Dr Frankenstein. I mean things that are so horrific it's almost hard to mention, but they really believe there is no human essence, that it's all accidental, it's all contingent….

Barron: Sartre says my existentialism means that existence precedes essence, so my freedom comes first, then I decide who or what I am. Well, that's from the French salon the 1940s and 50s. Now it's in the mind of every teenager in America. That there's a nature, that there's a givenness to our bodies, to our anthropology, that's seen as the problem—“that's oppressive!” 

We're on dangerous ground, aren't we, when we start playing that game of my existence completely trumps essence?

Rufo: Yeah, we're on dangerous ground but, most importantly, if you look at it as a practical matter, it just doesn't work.  It is disproven over and over and over, and that's really the problem with all of these revolutionary ideologies, at the end of the day, they are revolutions against nature, against human nature, against the social essence of what makes us human beings in community, and they have this romantic and idealistic notion, which is very attractive to people, especially young people, that you can overcome any limitation, that the limitations, the prescriptions of human nature, are structures of oppression that can be abolished. 

But ultimately the theme of the book is that the process you see in this revolution, and the process you see in all these revolutions, is one of idealism turning into disillusionment, turning into nihilism, and you see that largely in the philosophical line of thought and philosophical reasoning. You see it personally in many of these stories of the thinkers of the time, but then you also see it—and this is the most tragic and devastating—in the lives of people who are manipulated by these ideologies. Those kids are suffering from it. It's not just an abstraction. 

You have to tell them quite the opposite: there is an essence, there is a human nature, there is a way that things ought to be, and as a component of that, there are limitations that you should not only respect but actually those limitations are what give us the constraints and the bounds of being human. 

Again, do it easy! Catch up with the philosophical and political theory that underpins Wokeism. View the video of Rufo's discussion with Bishop Barron, which is refreshing in that it covers the trouble Western societies are in but also how ordinary people can recover their place at the centre of their culture, instead of being serfs within a feudalism dominated by the cultural elite.

Know your opponent and you need not fear 

Rufo's book aims to provide knowledge of the enemy in the manner of Sun Tzu's admonition, and to guide that counter-revolution the times demand. He writes:

Further:

In America, Florida gives hope. In Europe, Hungary and Poland do. Societies in Asia and Africa are also on alert, as a new form of colonialism-cum-imperialism is evident as the West seeks to impose its metaphysical stance upon the "natives" abroad by tying financial aid to a required cultural performance. The pushback from the Muslim community in the U.S. and U.K., and from parents generally in many nations, is a growing element within the political mix, providing opposition to an elite who rejects objective morality in favour of unbridled self-invention. Personal disintegration is the result, as recorded in the sad explosion in the West of anxiety, depression and suicide. 

Marcuse, the Marxist stalwart, in the vanguard 

Rufo has a valuable chapter examining the role of the German-American professor of philosophy and social theory, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who shaped Marxist-inspired Critical Theory for consumption by the New Left. This materialist movement fomented political agitation openly or by way of indoctrination through the education system, as we see even up to the present day.

Rufo expands with direct information on Marcuse's line of thought as a Marxist loyalist:

The drive for "disintegration" of society, for a "radical change in consciousness" and for "rebellion" that Rufo identifies in his book and his video discussion, dismays Bishop Barron, who repeatedly cites the Church's understanding of social renewal as a cooperative effort, springing from love for the other, even the opponent, an effort that works, not through condemning individuals or classes of citizens, as we see in the ubiquitous "cancel culture" under the aegis of the "diversity, equity, inclusion" regime, but through adherence to respect for the dignity of the human person.

Critical Theory wants nothing to do with the freedom of classical liberalism or that of classical biblical freedom, both of which rely on the discipline of desire. Rather it talks of a "liberating tolerance" which incorporates an intolerance that would permit censorship, repression and, where deemed necessary, violence. 

The picture of the leftist mindset presented by the video and book offers motivation for prayer coupled with action in defending society's moral and cultural heritage.

One thing more:  A word from Alasdair MacIntyre from 1969, at the height of  Marcuse's prominence. Writing in The New York Review, MacIntyre points to the origin of the abuse of science among the educated elite so widespread in Western society:

Marcuse now [in his 1969 publication] aspires to provide a biological basis for his theory. His biology is in fact as speculative as his metaphysics, and Marcuse explicitly disavows any scientific basis for his speculations. This does not however lead him to be less than dogmatic in his mode of assertion.

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