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Three Propositions On "Wokeness"
Wokeness is a spiritual problem. It deserves a spiritual answer.
I don’t love writing about “woke”-related issues, in part because I don’t really respect woke ideas or think they’re coherent enough to merit careful attention. Right-wing politics might be noxious, xenophobic, and otherwise dark, but at least I know where it comes from and what the theory of the case is. Wokeness on the other hand is best understood not as a political ideology but as a series of affections that resemble, but aren’t the same as, religious convictions. Along these lines, I wanted to share three propositions to help us better understand what “causes” wokeness and then to think about what to do about it, if anything.
This is a really important point from the political theorist Joshua Mitchell. He writes that identity politics is the "religious pandemic of our time." This has important implications. The pandemic can't be resolved by government action. A spiritual question requires a spiritual answer. I’ll leave you all to guess what that might be.
America is a democracy. So at a basic level, if "wokeness," like any other ideology, is culturally dominant, it's because enough people thought it was compelling—or they thought enough other people thought it was compelling to justifying finding it compelling themselves.
Turnstile jumping in the subway (or Metro if you’re a Washingtonian) is the new broken windows. Well-meaning, mostly white liberals often view it as harmless. But it's theft and creates a climate of lawlessness. If enough residents thought it was bad, we'd find a way to end it. But either they don't—or they're too afraid to do the right thing.
This suggests that a certain kind of cowardice—coupled with a thorny collective action problem—explains the persistence of woke ideas in our culture. If all the people who disliked wokeness, or even just had concerns about how far it’s gone, actually said so and acted accordingly, we’d find the wall crumbling quite quickly. But there are still considerable costs to individuals when it comes to challenging the status quo, particularly in left-leaning environments like journalism and academia.
At some level, for this to change, those individuals have to become financially and professionally secure enough to take certain risks. Or, they must be willing to take certain risks, irrespective of the financial and professional costs. For those with privilege, to choose not to take these (for them, relatively minor) risks, can seem like a question of integrity and not having enough of it. At the same time, I appreciate and even sympathize with the desire to live a quiet life where one avoids being embroiled in the most charged controversies of the day. Life, after all, is elsewhere.
Three Propositions On "Wokeness"
This article has good sentence structure, but the logic seems to be,
“X really vague thing which I don’t define” (“woke”)
=
“Y other thing I don’t define” (“religion”)
therefore
“Z, which I don’t explain.” (spiritual)
The only concrete point in the whole article is that turnstile jumping is bad (followed by a vague and unsupported assertion that “liberals” don’t mind it).
Like many Americans, I live in a place dominated by cars, not a subway. Could we then substitute a different low-level crime and try the same reasoning? For example, does speeding or running a red light create a similar culture of lawlessness? Arguably, these minor offences are worse than turnstile jumping as they can cause great harm to innocent others. But interestingly, no one ever seems to go after speeders or light runners for destroying our laws-based society, although these are crimes that most of us live with constantly. Interesting.
Perhaps we should follow your logic and go hard after such offences. And let’s not stop at traffic violations. Let’s go after all kinds of lawlessness. I suggest we start with vigorously prosecuting tax fraud perpetrated by those earning over $250,000 a year in either income or capital gains.
If this idea doesn’t fit with your moral framework, you may want to ask yourself how it is that turnstile jumping - a crime mostly committed by poor people- destroys our society, but tax fraud - mostly committed by the wealthy- is not nearly so bad.
This is one of the worst Shadi articles. I am not even sure what he is trying to say. Maybe if He tried to define what “Wokeness” is, that would have made a difference.