One of the stances1 we’ve all heard from the professionally (and perpetually) offended section of society known as the woke sludge is that, for some ill-specified reason, the work of dead white men ought to be rejected, or at least severely demoted in importance.
We’re going to remove this from the curriculum because it was written by a dead and white and male entity (biological sex, curiously, is important here). I presume they were alive when they did their writing.
These three characteristics are interesting
Dead : we should only pay attention to people who are currently writing (alive)
White : the writer’s skin colour is important to determine the value of the writing
Men : if you have a penis we can discount everything you say
Ageist, racist and sexist all in one short phrase. Way to go you pure-hearted and tolerant woketards!
I can quite confidently say I have never purchased a book, or read a book, based on any of these criteria. In fact, for a good portion of my library, I’ve literally no idea what genitalia are possessed by the author, or what skin hue they have, or even whether they are still breathing.
I’ve still less of an idea what these writers choose (or chose) to do with their genitalia, and with whom.
I don’t see why any of that is of the slightest importance. Is it a good book? That’s all I’m interested in.
Did finding out that Harper Lee was, in fact, a woman change anything about my appreciation of her brilliant work To Kill A Mockingbird?
I was quite surprised to find out (some time ago now) I had initially mis-sexed her - not because I thought a woman couldn’t possibly write so well, but because I had assumed Harper was a boy’s name 😂
A (very) strong leading contender for my favourite crime fiction writer is Val McDermid. We’d assign a high probability of femaleness based on the name, and we’d be right in this instance. She’s also a lesbian. Whilst her sexuality may well inform her writing as she’s writing, it in no way impacts my reading of her work. She’s a great writer - and that’s enough for me, and also the only thing that matters to me when I’m reading her work.
What does it say about me, as a man, that one of my all-time favourite fictional characters is Elizabeth Bennet, in a book written by a woman no less? In terms of today's allegedly important identity groups I have only my pasty and nasty whiteness in common with Elizabeth, but she’s inspiring and every bit as much a role model for me as Jack Bauer2.
I was brought up on the notion that if the colour of someone’s skin changed the way you thought about them, or treated them, then you were displaying racist tendencies. In the words of Jane Austen, had I displayed such tendencies I’d have been told in no uncertain terms “Badly done, Rigger. Badly done.”
Today, of course, I am viewed by the woke sludge as some crazed, frothing, extreme right-wing racist for having such ‘colour blind’ views.
Crazed? Frothing? Extreme? Reasonable adjectives to describe the observed behaviour of the woke as they lose their shit over some incorrectly-raced person selling food outside of their ethnically acceptable lane or, horror upon horror, styling their hair in a way not allowed by their particular ethnicity or race.
Whilst I can rave and froth and outrage as much as anyone else with my writing, I rarely, if ever, do this in person. The woke mind-control bots have no such compulsion.
The lady in pink here refused to raise her fist in ‘support’ of whatever it was a raised fist was supposed to represent3.
This picture, probably more than any other, typifies the rot, the cancer, that is given the label ‘woke’. It shows the ugly and totalitarian desire of zealots (something witnessed throughout history) to impose a uniformity of thought and opinion and feeling. But the very diversity of human thought and expression is so, so precious - and represented in the great variety of thoughts, ideas and reflections in the great works of literature.
The woke sludge prioritize collective group identities over individual variation and nuance. If you’re black you are ‘supposed’ to vote Democrat, for instance4. If you're gay and you have an issue with people displaying their fetishes at a Pride parade, then you're probably not gay at all!
The problem with the woke sludge is they seem to believe that membership of some crude category distinguished by skin colour, or sexuality, or whatever, confers some special insight, some knowledge and authority about the world and how it works. There is some (but only some) element of truth5 in that, but they take it further.
Not content with merely saying things like “hey, we’ve kind of ignored all this great stuff from Africa and other places” they dismiss the great stuff from their own culture with the ugly, and racist, condemnation that this body of work was created by “dead white men”.
The period of time known colloquially as the “Enlightenment” in which the ideas and output from a particular geographical region seemed to undergo a kind of explosion is often dismissed as a product of “colonialism” or “whiteness”. It was akin to the Cambrian explosion in the fossil record. It was like someone had taken the blinkers off and there was a great freeing up of the artistic, philosophical and scientific creative potential of the human mind.
The men who were responsible are indeed now long since dead. They were also (almost exclusively) men - and we can find much to lament with that because the times were such that women were disadvantaged and not allowed to participate in the same way. It’s a bit daft6 to deliberately seek to exclude the creative power of fully half of humanity, but such were the times.
They were, by and large, also white.
And, certainly, not all of the ideas and thoughts that were produced are palatable today. They were a product of their times. But if we can argue that Muhammad, for example, was a product of his times and preaching within the context of those times, and thereby seek to soften some of the harsher passages in Islamic scripture for a modern audience, why can we not apply the same forgiveness and understanding to the works of these dead white men from Europe?
Islam, for example, does not unequivocally condemn slavery7, but expressly permits it. The stain of slavery has long since been abolished in the West and recognized for the evil it is, although the ramifications of its legacy can still be felt today. It’s curious that the same vitriol that is applied to the now-historical concept of slavery in the West is not also applied to the sacred texts of Islam.
But I’m not going to do the woke thing here and dismiss Islam in its entirety because I profoundly disagree with (and am sickened by) some of its components. There is also much that is good about Islam.
Wokery, if nothing else, is characterized by the application of multiple, often contradictory, standards. Racism is really, really bad, but it’s OK to say the most racist things, as long as your target is white people. Diversity of thought is welcome as long as it’s not too diverse. If you have the “diverse” viewpoint, or thought, that we should be focusing on the content of someone’s character rather than the colour of their skin, then you’re a racist bigot who must be silenced, cancelled, and sometimes beaten to a pulp. Only certain kinds of diversity of thought are acceptable.
Despite the appalling human rights records of plenty of places across the globe, these are ignored and the “West” made out to be uniquely evil and worthy of contempt. The history of these non-white, non-European, places is often as brutal and bloody and colonial in nature as anything the West managed, but they are given a ‘free pass’.
But for all our flaws, and there were many, boy did we do some magnificent shit too.
It is possible that the Enlightenment could have happened elsewhere, but it didn’t, and its legacy has been the steady improvement of the lives and living conditions of people everywhere. There have been ups and downs in that progress and nor has it been uniformly applied, of course, and there have been some truly terrible acts along the way, but without the Enlightenment our lives would still be brutish, miserable and short.
We’d still be burning people at the stake for thinking and saying the wrong things. What’s that you say? We still are? Indeed. It’s kind of sad to see the woke sludge reverting to this kind of despotism. They have every appearance of wanting to take us back to a kind of society built on a religious fundamentalism. The notion of heresy is alive and well - the Great God of Woke brooks no dissent.
Woke seeks not to enlighten, but to control. It cannot tolerate dissent, yet its members describe themselves as the tolerant ones. They are amongst the most racist people alive today, and yet feel impelled to lecture the rest of us on how we can be “anti-racist8 ”.
But without the legacy of those dead white men, as flawed and imperfect and wicked as they sometimes undoubtedly were, where would we be today?
Yes, they weren’t saints. Yes, they had some views that we would reject today.
But, holy crap, did their work ultimately lead to a better world than they could ever have possibly imagined.
The fact that the woke are able to have a Twitter tantrum whilst drinking their almond and pomegranate latte made with Tibetan Yak’s milk, instead of scrabbling in the dirt looking for their next turnip, is largely the result of all those dead white men they disdain so very much.
Such pronouncements are often expressed with real heart-felt emotion; like hate
Pride and Prejudice might have been very different had Lizzie plunged a pair of scissors into Darcy’s knee whilst interrogating him
I forget what it was now - membership of the Society for the Performance of One-Armed Pull-Ups?
Source : Joe “You Ain’t Black” Biden
A book, for instance, about growing up as a gay man in 1950’s Britain would probably tend to be more impactful and insightful than a similar account written by a straight person. Not necessarily so, but probably. Even then, we could not take such a work to be representative of the experience of all gay men during that time.
Understatement alert here
It goes further in that women enslaved as a consequence of war could be legally bedded, with the full blessing of God. Such coerced coitus would, these days, be described as rape.
Anti-racism is the technical term for “saying bad stuff about whites”
If the non-white "civilisations" were and are so good, why then do they flock here?
And how could the sparsely populated european nations dominate the entire planet?
Anyone bleating about "white-whateverism" is welcome to (should be forced to under gunpoint):
a) go back to Africa, Arabia or Asia and stay there
b) hand over any and all technology et c made possible due to white europeans and their cultural offspring
c) make reparations for the enormous resources invested in the areas listed under a) to make them even semi-functional state
Or shut the fuck up, accept reality and try to better themselves.
Yes to all, and this is why I propose we rename the woke. The ancient Greeks may have been a bit xenophobic, but they were prescient: the language of the woke does sound like “bar-bar-bar.” It is completely unintelligible nonsense. They are our modern day barbarians. They want to destroy everything their perceived enemies have built, and yet once they do, they will realize they are left with nothing. They will be coronated over a wasteland of broken monuments and burned treasures. Some victory.