Proof of its hold on the minds of the well-educated and "progressive" elite has been demonstrated by the failure of those key groups to condemn the Hamas atrocity while holding demonstrations organised in the name of support for the Palestinian cause, but marked with an ugly outpouring of anti-Jewish sentiment that went far beyond attacks on Israeli policies.
Bari Weiss identifies how to be woke enough to glorify the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, as crowds did around the world, poses a threat to the West as a human project.
When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.
It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11 [2001], educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism. [See video and text of Weiss's speech here]
In his new book America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, Christopher Rufo says:
There is a rot spreading through American life. The country's foundations are starting to shake loose. A new nihilism is beginning to surround the common citizen in all the institutions that matter,: his government, his workplace, his church, his children's school, even his home. He knows we have been given a gift ‒ the American Republic ‒ but there is no guarantee it will last. He can feel it in his bones.
Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, author of Left is Not Woke, and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. The book examines the disease of division and intolerance promoted by the woke, meaning those on the political left, the self-proclaiming "progressives". These poor saps, desperate to believe they are on the right side of history, spread their contagion by creating innovative categories for people in general according to subjective identities such as race, colour, sex, and nationality, and especially the various degress of gender-bending.
Neiman's book makes...
...an impassioned defense against the corrosive particularisms that have eroded solidarity on the left. She argues that we must reclaim the kind of universalism that historically helped to forge diverse coalitions of activists in struggles for progress. To build a more just, equitable, and sustainable world, we need to acknowledge past victories, recognize the contingencies of our present, and embrace a radical politics of hope for our future.” Source
Other reviewers contribute insight into the parlous state of political thinking within woke circles:
“In these bleak times, Susan Neiman's book arrives as a breath of fresh air. Calmly but fiercely defending the principles of universalism and progress that once defined the left, she gives us a counter to the narrow tribalism that threatens to derail progressive politics” (Vivek Chibber, New York University).
[Neiman] "envisages a progressive movement drawing from the full range of the human family, from people of all classes, ethnic backgrounds, and sexual identities. She urges them to renew the values articulated by Enlightenment thinkers: not to confine human beings by ancestry or biology, not to settle for merely replacing one oppressive regime of power by another, not to abandon the hope of genuine human progress" (Philip Kitcher, Columbia University).
By digging into an essay first published in Germany, we observe the way Left is Not Woke applies a first-principles approach in what should be animating the struggle for equality and justice.
1. Universalism
First on the list involves criticism of what Neiman calls the left's incoherence in fomenting a battle pitting one avowed particularism against another alleged particularism. As opposed to this tribalism, and in upholding the fundamental universalism of movements for social change in recent centuries, she writes:
Where on the political spectrum do we place a worldview that believes deep connection and a sense of duty are possible only between people who belong to the same tribe? One that sees all claims of justice as concealed grabs for power? One that rejects all previous attempts to achieve progress as having failed or as having made matters worse? Views like these belong to the domain of traditional right-wing thought, from the French writer Joseph de Maistre to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Today they are held by thinkers as different as Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, Walter Mignolo, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Gayatri Spivak, and Frank B. Wilderson, III.
"If reason is nothing more than an instrument of domination, who should make the effort to formulate an argument or understand the arguments of others?"
They blame the problems of modernity on the ideas of the Enlightenment, typically without ever reading its foundational texts. In doing so, they jettison the core principles of social liberalism. For whoever puts tribal thinking before universalism, whoever reduces claims of justice to claims of power, and whoever regards past progress as merely instituting more subtle forms of oppression will have a difficult time actively engaging in left-wing causes.
Even worse: many of the woke, like many postcolonial thinkers — the categories overlap — equate reason with violence. They regard it as an instrument of domination with which white European men oppress the rest of the world. And where reason is rejected as violence, all that’s left is the celebration of subjectivity. Today it’s called positionality, according to which it is the position of the speaker that counts; what is said is secondary. If reason is nothing more than an instrument of domination, who should make the effort to formulate an argument or understand the arguments of others?
Considering universalism directly, Neimam writes:
Cultural diversity is both a fact and a blessing, but when it comes to political issues, we should focus on what unites us. The opposite of universalism is now called identitarianism, as if everything that constitutes our identity can be reduced to two dimensions. As Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us:
Until the middle of the 20th century … nobody who was asked about a person's identity would have mentioned race, sex, class, nationality, region or religion.
It is no coincidence that, from among those categories, race and gender are taken to define our essence. After all, these are the characteristics that we do not choose for ourselves and that are therefore capable of generating the most trauma. In this, the woke movement is part of a shift in perspective that began in the 1950s in which the victim came to supersede the hero as the subject of history. At one time, the shift spoke to moral progress. Victims’ stories were finally being heard and discussed by the public at large. But in the process, recognition became associated with what the world has done to people instead of what people have done to the world. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasised the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it is about the multiple forms of discrimination that individuals experience.
Likewise, in his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò decries the way "identity politics” is "polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off", as his publisher puts it. Seemingly, though the phrase was first used by "Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests".
Táíwò rejects such "elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, [and] advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world".
So Neiman has solid company in seeking the restoration of universalism as a pillar of social justice endeavours.
2. Justice
From Neiman:
The second basic principle of progressive thought is a firm distinction between justice and power. In practice, the distinction can be difficult to uphold. Commanders-in-chief have always claimed to wage just wars — Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush are only the most recent examples. But the principled distinction between justice and power is the foundation of progressive thought, however hard it may be to tell them apart in specific cases.
Human rights seek to put shackles on naked power. Let us not forget the historical circumstances in which those rights arose: if a peasant took the prince’s deer, he could be hanged; if a prince took the peasant’s daughter, that was just the way the world was. Without the effort to separate might from right, there is no concept of right at all.
3. Progress
Neiman continues:
The third basic idea uniting those who stand on the left side of the political spectrum is the conviction that people can work together to make significant progress in the real conditions of their own and others’ lives. This is often caricatured as the belief that progress is inevitable — an idea that, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, even the most committed Hegelian had to abandon. Enlightenment thinkers merely believed that progress was possible, in contrast to right-wing thinkers, who argue that the progress of a humanity burdened by Original Sin can never be moral, only technological.
Of course, woke activists want progress — they would be more credible, however, if they acknowledged that some progress or other has already occurred. Consistently demonstrating that for every previous step forward there have been two steps back can obscure a clear view of where you’re headed. When feminists in the West claim that we still live in a patriarchy, or woke Americans say that racism is part of the DNA of the United States, they are pointing to progress not yet achieved. That racism, sexism, and homophobia continue to exist in Western societies is beyond question. But if we don’t acknowledge that gradual progress has been made, we will be hard pressed to find the will and courage to fight for further improvement.
That reference to Original Sin brought to mind the oft-quoted truth expressed by Russian political prisoner and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
A similar train of thought is this: The greatest tragedy of this age is that we have lost the sense of sin.
Finally, Neiman has something to add by way of a conclusion:
Like progress, ideas of solidarity and justice drive woke struggles against discrimination. What falls under the radar is that the theories the woke embrace subvert their own goals. Without universalism, there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of individual tribes jockeying for power. If that’s all politics is, there’s no way to maintain a robust idea of justice. And without commitments to increasing universal justice, we cannot coherently strive for progress.
As said above, there is a radical incoherence in wokeism. Clearly, that such an absurd ideology should capture the elite controlling institutions around the developed world proves we are far from resolving the mystery of human incompleteness, or confirming our understanding of the dynamics of human experience.
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