the great awokening

Againstism

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Charles C.W. Cooke:

Why isn’t this a problem? I find this question genuinely fascinating. What is it about those ideas being expressed by someone foreign — someone who can plausibly (albeit stupidly) be cast as a victim — that causes otherwise exquisitely sensitive people to completely gloss over them? In quotidian American politics, the most inconsequential of sentiments are routinely cast as being a part of the “white, male, cisgendered hegemony.” But Osama bin Laden starts talking about the evils of homosexuality and fornication, about the fusing of church and state, and about “complete submission to His Law,” and it’s just . . . ignored.

This same trend has been on display at many of the anti-Israel protests, where I’ve seen quite a lot of people wearing T-shirts that read, “Queers for Palestine” or “LGBT for Hamas” or what you will. It’s utterly delusional — almost to the point of pride. This is your brain on intersectionality. How to fight back remains anyone’s guess.

I feel like I’ve seen this a lot lately: people peering into the void of wokeness and attempting to discern the core of it, the ruling principle. But I’m here to tell them to stop wasting their time. There’s nothing there beyond what I think of as “againstism.” The emotional fuel of it, as Nietzsche always said, is resentment. But intellectually, there’s nothing of substance there. The point is simply to be against anything perceived to be established, successful, dominant, or powerful — whiteness, heterosexuality, capitalism, America, the West, etc. It’s the perpetual rage of the spoiled adolescent who has never had to consider how much comfort and security he takes for granted even as he blindly flails against it. Why do we find Western libertines supporting Islamic terrorism? Because it’s also against everything they resent. Why do we find trust-fund brats advocating for Communism? Say it with me now: it’s also against everything they resent. What the hell does it mean when we see signs about “reproductive justice” at anti-Israel protests, or when a kid famous for refusing to go to school anymore leads a chant of “no climate justice on occupied land”? It just means that countless resentments can fit inside a pinhead. We’re against it all! The Coalition of the Oppressed is made up of multiple marriages of convenience with nothing in common but an enemy, marriages which can be annulled on a whim. Jews are favored against right-wing populists, but disfavored against Muslims, who in turn become villains when they protest against gender ideology in schools. That same gender ideology trumps the TERFs formerly known as feminists, who were in favor when battling against patriarchy. It’s an intersectional version of rock, paper, scissors, or maybe musical chairs, or perhaps Calvinball. If the Western white male capitalist didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented just to act as a centripetal force.

We Effing Love Science

By in extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis, science, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jerry Coyne:

In the end, we have still more evidence that Scientific American is no longer circling the drain, but is now in the drain, headed for, well, the sewers. It used to have scientists writing about their field, with no ideological bias, but now has ideologues (these authors happen to be scientist-ideologues) writing about science in a biased and misleading way.

Apparently this trend will continue, and apparently the publishers won’t do anything about it. So it goes. But those of you who want your science untainted by “progressive” ideology had best look elsewhere.

Those who advocated for Lysenkoism at least had the excuse of fearing that they and their families would be imprisoned, or worse, for dissenting. We should always remember with disgust how little it took for our modern ideologues to submit to this insanity. Peer pressure? Loss of status? Maybe having to look for a new job? Cowardly whores, all of them.

On or About December 2007 Human Character Changed

By in books, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

CBC:

She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school’s library books are gone.

In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that “if the shelves look emptier right now it’s because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008.”

Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education.

They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

“The Peel District School Board works to ensure that the books available in our school libraries are culturally responsive, relevant, inclusive, and reflective of the diversity of our school communities and the broader society,” said the board.

Directive 18 instructs the board to complete a diversity audit of schools, which includes libraries.

“The Board shall evaluate books, media and all other resources currently in use for teaching and learning English, History and Social Sciences for the purpose of utilizing resources that are inclusive and culturally responsive, relevant and reflective of students, and the Board’s broader school communities,” reads the directive.

PDSB’s “equitable curation cycle” is described generally in the board document as “a three-step process that holds Peel staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate, so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant.”

I would comment, but I’m too busy building an underground library before the Past Eaters figure out what I’m up to.

Keep Sleeping

By in political philosophy, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Of course we can define “woke.” We can define it as “left-wing racialist ideology.” We can define it as the attempt to achieve “critical consciousness,” which is a neo-Marxist term, meaning awakening the subject to his own oppression, then recruiting him into left-wing revolution. Or, if we use it as a stand-in for an ideology such as critical race theory, it simply means that “the United States is an oppressor nation that divides classes along the lines of race and then endorses active discrimination in order to create racial equity or equality of group outcomes.

This was a hot topic several weeks ago, but, tortoise that I am, I’m only now ambling over to examine it up close, having considered it from afar. The precise definition of “woke” is unnecessary, of course. We all know it when we see it. Only pedants, activists and academics care about such squabbles. But if idle speculation on irrelevant topics is wrong, then baby, I don’t want to be a blogger.

Anyway, I’ve seen several people define it along these lines. Wilfred Reilly has one of the most frequently-quoted versions:

a “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.

To which I say: OK, but how is this anything other than the basic logic of affirmative action applied as widely as possible, and how is that anything new? In other words, what, if anything, makes “wokeness” unique, not just another way of saying “left-wing”? If a mainstream liberal Rip Van Winkle nodded off in 2003, he would awaken in 2023 to find himself regarded as a conservative, if not a “fascist,” without changing a single thing in his outlook. This dramatic shift is what people are referring to when they say “woke.” What explains this?

Look over the last decade or so, at all the significant trends and events. Race riots? Those were happening before I was even born. Spoiled rich Ivy League students acting like Red Guards against their hapless professors and administrators? Likewise. Political correctness? Nothing significant about it has changed since the first wave of my youth. Cancel culture? I think that’s just what you get when you combine the vindictive, vengeful parts of human nature with the power and reach of social media. Even transgenderism is just the hastily-attached caboose on the civil rights train, a desperate attempt by the St. Georges of the left to avoid retirement after winning the gay rights battle. How much of this is anything but typical left-wing politics, amplified and magnified to the extreme? It just seems to reappear each generation now, like a plague of locusts.

If you ask me, and even if you don’t, the thing that gives this era its particular character is the increasing illiberalism of the left, driven primarily by what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called “safetyism.” I don’t particularly care for the term, but I’m not sure what to replace it with. Call it the therapeutic mindset, the victimhood revolution, the glorification of fragility, weakness, and mental illness. Whatever it is, you find it behind all the most characteristic pathologies of our time. How did the left, in the name of anti-racism, come to embrace racially-segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, something that would have pleased an old Klansman? How did the left, which created the Free Speech Movement sixty years ago, come to disavow the concept and openly embrace censorship in the name of preventing “harm”? How did the left, which made “question authority” into a bumper-sticker slogan, come to embrace the increasingly-fluid integration, or even collusion, between corporate, tech, and government authorities as revealed in the Twitter Files?

I don’t think any of it would have been possible without the safetyism mentality which permeates everything now. Black students have to be kept separate from white ones, not because they’re inferior, but because they need to be protected from the micro, nano, and picoaggressions they’d be subjected to from their white peers. Unfettered free speech carries the high risk of mild discomfort or annoyance for anyone exposed to ideas they don’t already agree with. People who don’t have advanced degrees or the proper cultural conditioning can’t be trusted to make political decisions unsupervised, lest they elect a reality TV star to the presidency, or vote to leave the European Union, so elite guardians have to secretly monitor their media diets for harmful levels of “disinformation.” Even transgenderism is frequently presented like a demand in a hostage situation — if you don’t “affirm” them in their delusions, they’ll supposedly be at heightened risk of suicide, and it will be your fault if that happens.

Say what you will about the pre-Awokening left, it generally claimed to be working toward providing downtrodden people with dignity. The woke left has given up all pretense of that. There is no dignity in being an object of pity and condescension. There is no dignity in an identity constructed entirely on a sense of fragile victimhood and emotional incontinence. There is no dignity in accepting perpetual infantilization. This is the most significant thing that has changed in recent years, the willing exchange of dignity for a sickly sentimentality and endless resentment. This is the climate of opinion under which we live now.

Remember, Freddie’s Red

By in ohferfucksake, the great awokening No Comments

Freddie deBoer:

I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.

“I’d prefer utopia, but if I can’t have that, I’ll choose the pink police state.” DeBoer in a nutshell. Like many of his posts, I saw this one being shared among conservatives who inexplicably find him to be an oasis of honesty and integrity on the left. But even this post, where he takes his fellow leftists to task for disingenuously refusing to define the word “woke” (or accept anyone else’s definition), is not really a criticism of dishonesty. It’s mostly a complaint that woke politics isn’t really left-wing politics at all, just the bourgeois posturing of spoiled rich kids building their brands. It’s not radical enough, in other words. Too individualist. Ordinary intelligent people, lacking the academic’s ability to rationalize, will look at the Great Awokening and say, “If this is what ‘not radical enough’ looks like, I’ll stick with the imperfect status quo, thanks.” Not our hero. Progress requires that he eventually endorse the direction the woke are heading in, however regrettably, since the libertarian-socialist cavalry are nowhere to be seen on the horizon. This is the sort of counterintuitive deep thinking that makes Andrew Sullivan tinkle in his pants with excitement at the thought of “unpacking.” Ironically enough, his “civil libertarian socialist” ideal is the sort of political stance that can only ever exist as a, uh, bourgeois eccentricity, not as a mass movement. Most of us understand that intuitively, but then again, most of us don’t proudly proclaim ourselves to be “fourth-generation Marxists.”

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Sensitivity Readers

By in books, fresh hell, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jeff Zymeri:

Children’s horror author R.L. Stine has accused his publisher of editing references to weight, mental health, and ethnicity in over a dozen of his books without his permission.

Certain titles from the Goosebumps anthology, second only to the Harry Potter books in terms of popularity, have been re-released as sanitized e-books by Scholastic, a new report from The Times has revealed. The move comes after huge controversy enveloped the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s books for hundreds of similar changes, leading the publisher to agree to continue printing the original versions alongside the new bowdlerized editions.

On the one hand, it’s no surprise to see the kind of person behind these initiatives. I mean, they can’t all get make-work jobs in academia or human resources departments, and we’ve got a huge surplus of the severely educated with no practical skills, so I suppose this is the best we can do to keep them off the streets. On the other hand, couldn’t they have gone into a more honorable profession, like prostitution or drug-dealing? At least those provide a useful service. What kind of lowlife dreams of growing up to work at Winston Smith’s job?

You Know They’re Going to Come for You and Drag Your Silly Name Into the Mud

By in atheism, history, the great awokening No Comments

Ed West:

The writer Peter Juul has identified three religious strands to the awokening. Most important is anti-racism, with whiteness and white supremacy ‘as the mystical and all-pervasive source of evil in the world’. Juul writes how ‘the concept of “white privilege” stands in for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, complete with ritual confessions of sin that can never fully absolve a person of their fallen state’. White supremacy is a form of evil that explains all sorts of injustice, however logically implausible.

Then there is climate apocalypticism, which has more straightforward biblical undertones. I’m concerned about climate change — I’m fairly pessimistic about most things — but I agree that there is an obvious apocalyptic element to the movement, which is not backed up by the (admittedly worrying) scientific models.

Finally, there is gender identity, whereby someone’s ‘soul’ might be separate from their body. This last belief is the most recent of the strands, and in some ways the most extreme. It also feels the most obviously religious; the endless wrangling debates about whether someone has a female or male essence is perhaps the most theological our politics has got in years.

That this is proclaimed by people who otherwise declare that we ‘trust the science’, including members of the scientific establishment, makes it doubly strange (of course, what many people say about this is issue in public varies with what they say in private). But then, I suppose, it is only strange if you don’t appreciate that politics and religion are inherently linked.

I don’t know that history is merely “one damn thing after another.” More accurately, we could say, “This again? Are you kidding me?” History displays less imagination in rebooting old ideas than Hollywood does. Is it really so strange to consider that we may be moving back toward a political definition of atheism, as in ancient Rome, in which failure to pay obeisance to the official state cults can get one charged with impiety and exiled from professional life? Not to me. Luckily, the Epicurean injunction to “live unnoticed” was in my DNA from the beginning. I’ve been secretly heresying all my life.  And so I say, to all my newly-minted “atheist” friends:

Educate the Filipinx

By in juxtapositions, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.

— Source: General James Rusling, “Interview with President William McKinley,” The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17.

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In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: “The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.”

— John B. Judis

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Filipinos slammed the comic-book convention Comic-Con International on social media last week when it referred to a group of Filipino content creators as “Filipinx.”

“The Filipinx Voices in Pop Culture was a fun and educational all Filipinx panel discussing Filipinx influences behind your favorite media,” Comic-Con tweeted on Thursday, using the alternative gender-neutral ethnic term preferred by some gender identity activists to refer to people from the Philippines. Comic-Con’s use of the term drew immediate backlash from users, including Filipinos.

“I’d rather be called a racial slur than Filipinx” one user wrote.

“Please stop trying to impose weird western gender ideology onto people who never wanted it or asked for it in the first place” another said.

— Robert Schmad

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If history is any guide, this burst of moral enthusiasm will pass. It will leave its marks on Western history; some virtuous, but most risible and excessive. And when future historians look back on our time, they will do so with condescension and pity. They will be navigating their own moral panics, of course. But they will also be confident in their own accumulated wisdom—enough, at least, to look upon us with embarrassment and to thank the stars for their own enlightened age. And the cycle explored in this book will begin again.

We can only hope that there will be someone around then to write about how truly awful we all were.

— Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun

I Am Strong, I Am Invincible, I Am Birthing Person

By in atheism, jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening 1 Comment

Ed West:

Back in the 2000s New Atheists used to have a good old laugh at Christians, fighting and killing over the minutiae of doctrine. And then many of those same people evolved into social justice activists, and are now having their own tortured theological debates about the meaning of ‘woman’. In contrast to the bravery with which people attack sacred doctrine and dogma from centuries past, they find themselves powerless when it is staring them in the face.

I chortled, I did. If I may be so immodest as to quote myself:

The tragedies and dilemmas we encounter, individually and collectively, are not necessarily errors which can be fixed with more knowledge. Increased knowledge will only be used in service to the same old unenlightened desires, possibly even creating new dilemmas in the process. And even when we know how little we know, we find a way to convince ourselves that we’ve learned our lesson and become smarter for the experience.

Atheists are, it must be admitted, particularly prone to this. Despite their pretensions to rational objectivity, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for suspecting that atheists are just another group of tribesmen who slew a rival desert god and ate his brains, believing they were ingesting his powers of omniscience.

I see it was almost a decade ago that I wrote that. Despite a notable decline in my writing ability in the interval, I haven’t changed. I’m still an unbeliever; in fact, as the Official Atheists used to say before they caught the brain virus, we’re all unbelievers to some degree; I just happen to disbelieve in one more God than they do; namely the God of Social Justice, or RGHTSDFHSTRY, as the Book of Intersectionality calls him. But I digress. I didn’t call you all here to wrangle over theological disputes. No, this is a celebratory occasion! I raise my glass tonight to all my erstwhile progressive friends who used to treat my email address as a confessional booth, shamefully disclosing their heretical doubts over the revealed truth of transgenderism, even as they felt compelled to pretend in public that the real danger to the body politic came from rural theocrats in Indiana. As we watch Supreme Court nominees profess to be utterly stumped over the meaning of such abstruse legal concepts as “woman;” as we watch the various party commissars and commentators tie themselves in intellectual knots to justify this feigned ignorance while praying fervently that the gastric distress resulting from swallowing so many necessary lies doesn’t cause any thoughtcrime to squeak loose onto their permanent record like an inadvertently loud fart in public, we should remember, my friends, that these are indeed the best of times. In fact, I can’t even deny the evidence any longer. I can no longer in good conscience claim to be an unbeliever when it is abundantly clear that there is a trickster god who loves us and wants us all to be amused. I, for one, am quite amused.

Bodhisattva, Would You Take Me By the Hand?

By in religion, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

It’s common to notice that much left-wing political crusading is a form of barely-transfigured Christianity, but as we see here, it’s broadminded enough to absorb elements of Buddhism as well. In fact, social justice is to religion as Rome was to its provinces. Practice whatever quaint local customs you want, as long as you make all the proper sacrifices to the imperial Cult of the Right Side of History.

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