This may be a longish, and somewhat rambling, contribution. I have a number of ill-formed thoughts buzzing around my head and I’m hoping that an attempt to capture them in writing will help to crystallize at least some of them.
In my last post I drew your attention (if it needed drawing) to James Lindsay’s magnificent, but provocative, speech at the European Parliament on the 30th March this year. Love him or loathe him, in my view Lindsay has done some fabulous work in attempting to trace the origins of ‘woke’ through the evolution of some of the major philosophical, social, and academic themes of the 20th century.
In that speech he talks of cultural capital as a kind of private property that is protected by the dominant ideology. From the ‘woke’ perspective, then, he argues that whiteness is a kind of private property that separates the haves (the whites, the white adjacent, and the white actors) from those who do not possess it and are therefore ‘oppressed’ by the dominant ideology of white supremacy which seeks to maintain whiteness.
When you lay it out like that, the parallels with Marxist analysis is very clear. It’s the same old, same old, us vs them, prole vs bourgeois, oppressor vs oppressed, narrative that Marx applied to economic systems in his attack on the dominant ideology of capitalism.
Marx wanted to bring about a class consciousness that would free mankind from the shackles of capitalism and lead to an equitable society. He saw, in socialism, an evolution (or return?) to man’s true nature as a social being. This evolution was to be brought about by this class consciousness that led to a revolution as people threw off the yoke of their oppressors. He summarized it thus : Marxism is the abolition of private property.
One of the main themes of ‘woke’ is the abolition of another kind of private property; that of whiteness.
Whether the majority of the ‘woke’ realize this is immaterial. The parallel is too strong and clear to effectively deny. The academics who have spawned this movement are not so reticent (or gullible?) as the so-called useful idiots who spew the various slogans and platitudes we all know and love, and explicitly reveal their intent. Lindsay, for example, mentions one work from 1995 which explicitly describes whiteness as ‘property’.
In a previous post on how these ideas have infiltrated even math classes I drew attention to a program in which teachers were encouraged to “challenge the ways in which math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views” (emphasis mine).
The inclusion of “capitalist” there in that list of mortal sins is very telling indeed. It reveals so much about the political ‘home’ that has given birth to this woke bastard. It’s simply taken for granted that capitalism is a BAD thing.
Look once again at how ‘whiteness’ was characterized by the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian didn’t just randomly come up with this list of the evils of whiteness; they’re drawn from the hallowed halls of academic ‘thought’.
My favourite is the food one. Anyone who can describe European food as ‘bland’ is an ignorant arsehole. Are they implying that food which doesn’t strip several layers of skin from your mouth and epithelial layers of digestive tract is somehow inferior? Don’t get me wrong, I love food with flavour - including all sorts of non-European cuisines, but if you think a steak from a lovingly-reared cow, expertly seasoned and cooked, is ‘bland’, there’s something wrong with your taste buds.
Others on the list are just silly, or strawmen.
Notice how individuality and self-reliance are attacked here. Fundamentally, the rise of ‘western’ society has been about maximising individual liberty within the constraints of a well-run society1 (and we have a lot of freedoms that we didn’t 300 years ago - although some of those hard-won freedoms are currently under severe attack). It’s even written in the very foundation of the US; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Such a powerful, and wonderful, driving philosophy that is, these days, dismissed as “whiteness”.
It has been a story of individual progress and increasing wealth, prosperity and freedom for the majority. It hasn’t been a perfect story by any means, but the trend has been clear and indisputable. Transport yourself back 3 centuries and see if you want to stay there. We take so many things for granted and are not nearly as grateful as we ought to be for the massive, massive, benefits capitalism, technology and the access to global markets have brought to the majority2. If this is all “whiteness” then, yes, sign me up for ‘white’ supremacy!
If some of the things described by the Smithsonian are “whiteness”, then I’m very grateful for this thing called whiteness. It’s a great cultural legacy. It’s also not particularly ‘white’, either, since many other cultures would recognise many of these things as positives.
But notice how they frame this - the implicit assumption is that whiteness is BAD. Anything associated3 with the evils of a paler skin can be dismissed and needs to be dismantled. It is nothing less than a deliberate attack on the entirety of western civilization.
It’s an attack on the societal and cultural capital of the ‘west’.
How is this trick done? How did we get to this point where everything about our culture is spoken of in the most disgusting and pejorative terms?
The trick is to instil a kind of knee-jerk reaction; an almost Pavlovian response.
Look at how being ‘right wing’ has become to be pretty synonymous with being morally deficient and selfish. I am not right wing in the old meaning of that word. But I’m disgusted by the way very decent, honourable and lovely people who happen to be right wing are smeared in this fashion.
It’s a learned reaction.
The whole faux outrage at the “trans women are not women” thing, for example, is a learned reaction.
It doesn’t matter what the particular source of ‘outrage’ is, the point is to inculcate this learned and artificial outrage. To be a ‘good’ and ‘decent’ person you must learn to be outraged in a specific way about specific things.
That’s how J.K. Rowling can be described as a ‘hateful bigot’. It’s a learned reaction to someone who is almost as far from being hateful or bigoted as it is possible to imagine.
It was the same with Jordan Peterson. The mere mention of his name is enough to set the ‘compassionate and tolerant’ off on some demented vitriolic screed. Yet, ask for specific examples of things he said that were so hateful and terrible and 99% of the time they can’t. If you’re very lucky this 1% will mention something that 99% of the time is based wholly on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what he actually said.
It’s the generation of these automatic triggers that has been so devastating.
The only way out of this is to be completely unapologetic.
I’m upholding whiteness you say? Well, yes, I am. It’s been fucking brilliant. I love whiteness. The more people do this in response, the less power we cede to the woke morons.
As soon as you play into their guilt game, you’ve lost. Don’t do it. Their whole methodology is dependent on instilling this sense of guilt and shame in the ‘oppressor’ and an exaggerated sense of grievance in the ‘oppressed’. It all falls apart when you don’t play along. They try to get you on the defensive if you’re in the oppressor class, and very much on the offensive if you’re in the oppressed class.
It’s the ‘mid-level violence’, this technique of provocation, that Lindsay describes in his speech.
Lindsay starts his speech with a very effective analogy. He describes Marxism as the genus and the various strands of woke thought as being species within this genus. Thus ‘classical’ Marxism is one species, queer theory another species, post-colonialism another species, and so on. It’s all Marxism, but different evolved forms adapted to specific environments; economic, sexual, historical etc.
I think this is the right way of looking at it. Everything about the woke we’re suffering with today falls under the basic theology of Marxism.
Each species has their own terminology, their own focus, their own characteristics, but the underlying techniques and the overarching philosophy are drawn from Marxism.
It’s a bunch of consensual sects that live within one overarching sect.
The fundamental problem with Marxism (not that I’m a particularly learned scholar of Marxism) is the rejection of the individual. The collective assumes a far greater importance within Marxist thought. The idea is that by getting the collective (society) right then individual happiness will automatically follow. This facile rejection of the wonderful variety of human beings is the sort of meaningless sludge that only an academic, a theologian, or a philosopher could dream up.
When the rubber of socialism meets the road of plenty it falls apart. Lindsay briefly mentions this, too. The academic Marxists were devastated to find that their dreary and bleak vision for humanity didn’t take hold in Europe. Why not? Because people were enjoying the fruits of living in a capitalist system. They were getting more prosperous, with more freedom and leisure time, and the ‘benefits’ of socialism seemed like anything but. It could only really take hold in truly oppressive and somewhat agrarian more feudalistic societies.
The average person in Russia or China probably had a lot more to be aggrieved about than the average person in Europe at the time.
Why is it, do you think, that the ‘woke’ are trying so desperately to inculcate a similar level of ‘grievance’ in the west?
Even the very term ‘woke’ is about awakening this new kind of class consciousness. They’re trying to ‘awaken’ a similar level of extreme grievance that led to the revolutions in Russia and China.
We need to stop playing their games. It’s the only way out of this stupidity.
But, but, but, wurble, wurble, wurble. What about all of those scholarly articles that have researched things like whiteness, white privilege, gender, queerness, colonialism and so on?
There’s an amazing consensus of academic thinking. So it must have some basis, surely?
Scholarly consensus is remarkably easy to achieve. Here’s something you can try in your spare time at home. Pick one of the reputable ‘journals’ that deal with grievance issues. Write a paper rejecting the notion of whiteness, for example. What’s the probability of getting it published do you think? It wouldn’t matter if you’d written the most brilliant, insightful and masterful analysis, do you think it would get accepted for publication?
Not a chance.
That’s how you establish and maintain the illusion of consensus in an academic field. This kind of thing happened with covid, it happens with climate change where it’s next to impossible to publish anything that questions the “oh my God we’re all going to be chargrilled” narrative.
There’s nothing truly objective about any academic discipline. Even in physics it’s hard (but not totally impossible) to get something published that pushes against the accepted ‘consensus’. It’s even harder to get funding for research if you write a proposal that is deemed to fall too far outside of the consensus.
With the social ‘sciences’, particularly the grievance studies part of it, there isn’t even a pretence of objectivity half the time. Indeed, the pursuit of objectivity is even seen as yet another despicable aspect of whiteness.
My advice for the future?
Say no to consensual sects.
And the focus has been more on maintaining individual liberty rather than on society. Obviously there needs to be some societal structure in place; we should not be ‘free’ to harm others. In general, however, things have been set up to try and maximise liberty. Laws, for example, are written so that anything not expressly proscribed is permitted. In the last few years, especially during covid, we have moved somewhat away from that ideal.
And, yes, some of these benefits have arisen from ‘colonialism’. So what? We can’t change the past no matter how much the woke wish to. We did bad stuff amongst the good stuff - but the fools calling for ‘reparations’ can get bent (UK slang that is more polite than saying “fuck off”)
Until the ‘woke’ came along very few people, anywhere in the world, would have described things like rationality or politeness or good time-keeping as “white” properties. We sometimes forget that all of these terms that trip off today’s tongues as if they have always been evident and obvious are extremely recent inventions of the woke. Almost nobody outside of academia was thinking in these kinds of terms a mere decade or so ago.
"It doesn't matter what the source of the outrage is" makes me think again about an article Adrian Vermeule wrote at First Things a while back called "The Liturgy of Liberalism". The religious energy of modern progressivism requires it to be constantly identifying, and then triumphing over, your supposed backwardness... and it doesn't matter whether today's particular battle makes sense or not. Many people today are upset by the effort to trans the kids, but if you just hand the Left victory on that, they MUST come up with something even more absurd to demand. They must. Their religious energy requires this conflict. Hence there can never be a peaceful world with modern Leftism, because that religion would whither and die if peace was ever obtained.
Out of school, I had a job at a furniture shop where I did drafting and worked in the shop as well. At the time I was someone who used the phrase 'I'm sorry' out of habit, alot, I think I learned it from my mother, who often started her sentences with 'I'm sorry' out of habit, being depreciative of herself. The shop steward was a wily fellow from Arkansas. At one point, when I said 'I'm sorry' to start a sentence, he broke in and said, 'You sure are'. Kudos to him, I was cured of it then and there.