It's Time for a Post-Woke Culture and Politics
On the limitations of Woke vs Anti-Woke, and How Wokeness Misdirected the Desire for Social Justice
In recent years, much has been said about there being a 'woke vs anti-woke' divide in Western culture and politics. It all started about a decade ago, when, due to a combination of factors, ideas from postmodernism and critical theory began to increasingly influence parts of the progressive side of politics. Over the course of just a few years, practices that challenged traditional liberal values, like deplatforming speakers, cancel culture, oppressor vs oppressed models of identity politics, thinking of people as pieces in a system rather than equal individuals, and skepticism towards science and objectivity, began to influence progressive movements like feminism, environmentalism, and LGBT equality. These ideas also found their way into progressive-adjacent cultures like atheism and veganism. They have been received controversially in all of these areas, dividing people in these communities into being for them or against them, which later came to be known as woke and anti-woke respectively.
I guess there was a time when having an 'anti-woke coalition', as it was originally understood, actually made sense. Back when postmodernism and critical theory were poorly understood by most, it was probably the most effective way to push back against this rise of illiberalism on the Left that seemed to have come out of nowhere. If anything, having a strong coalition aligned against these ideas was an effective method of raising awareness, and we needed to do so quickly, because of the rapid rise of this new illiberal faction in the Left. Besides, in those days, it was mainly progressive, liberal and moderate people involved in the coalition, which meant the reactionary faction wasn't dominant.
However, we are now in a different place. There is now plenty of awareness and resistance towards postmodernism, critical theory, and their associated ideas and methods. I mean, critical race theory has gone from obscurity to a widely discussed topic in just two years, and I think it is great that we are discussing these ideas and their faults so openly and so frequently. However, we also need to realize that the so-called 'woke' ideas aren't entirely going away anytime soon. For those hoping for a complete victory, I need to burst your bubble. These ideas have been established in parts of academia and activism for so long that they would be here in some form for the foreseeable future, and we will just have to live with it while not letting it take over, until perhaps one or two more generations down the line, when the intellectual landscape of the West would have had enough time to organically evolve away from these ideas. Therefore, I believe we need to think in terms of the long term, as to what we should do next.
The problem I see with the 'woke vs anti-woke' model right now is that it is evolving rapidly into an 'us vs them' game, and likely a successor to the old-school left vs right culture wars. As many of us already know, the left vs right culture wars were pretty unhealthy, because it divided people into opposing camps in an unsound way, thus encouraging tribalism. If we are to seriously sort people out by their political views, we would need at least three axes, namely economic, capitalist vs socialist; social, progressive vs conservative; and governmental, libertarian vs authoritarian. Given the issues of particular importance in contemporary Western politics, we might also need pro-globalization vs nationalist, pro-peace vs hawkish, and pro-establishment vs anti-establishment, since the three basic axes don't capture these views very well. In other words, any simplistic dichotomous model would just be encouraging tribalism while not being actually useful. This applies equally to the old-school left vs right and the new woke vs anti-woke.
And we are already seeing the unhealthy and counterproductive results of the 'woke vs anti-woke' model's evolution into a tribalist politics. People are already using the word 'woke' to describe things they don't like which have nothing to do with postmodernism or critical theory. As I previously said, 'woke' now effectively means whatever you don't like. Hence the old-school liberals can call the criticalists 'woke', but the hardline conservatives can also call the old-school liberals 'woke'. The problem with this is that 'woke' effectively becomes a lazy insult, and this is not good for independent thinking and pursuit of the objective truth. Moreover, if 'woke' means nothing solid, its meaning becomes vulnerable to constant change, essentially defined by the prevailing political fashions and alliances of the moment. This, in turn, can cause anti-woke culture to become a backdoor for authoritarian elements to take over pro-liberty movements, as some members and supporters of the US Libertarian party have recently begun to worry about.
To sum up, the 'anti-woke coalition' of the 2010s have already achieved their purpose, and that was to shine a spotlight on the faulty ideas of postmodernism and critical theory, and put this issue into the mainstream of Western political discourse. However, the 'woke vs anti-woke' model of politics has also inevitably become tribal and is rapidly losing its original meaning, and could even be vulnerable to takeover by authoritarian forces, which means that we must question its utility going forward. This is an important question because postmodernism and critical theory are not going to disappear any time soon, and we will need to live with these ideas while continuing to argue against them for the foreseeable future. The question then becomes, firstly, is the 'woke vs anti-woke' model a good model for the long term, and if not, what model should we choose instead. Given that effective arguments against postmodernism and critical theory must be philosophically sound and rooted in a commitment to the objective reality to be successful, a tribalist model like 'woke vs anti-woke' is probably not the best choice for making those arguments, especially in the longer term.
Therefore, I think it's time we start actively moving to a 'post woke' mode, where we remain very conscious of the faulty ideas of postmodernism and critical theory, and their adverse influence on contemporary Western culture and politics, but instead of just being negative about these ideas, we should start being more constructive, and more thoughtful about building alternatives that actually fulfill the yearning for progress and inclusion, and still reinforce the heritage of the liberalism rooted in the Western Enlightenment. The awareness that the anti-woke moment brought has been essential to getting us to where we are, and will be essential to ensure that whatever we come up with in the future isn't contaminated by postmodernism and critical theory. However, I believe we need to change course now, and go more positive rather than negative, to actually stand for something rather than just against something.
The other thing that differentiates post-woke from anti-woke is that, having learned from how postmodernism and critical theory misdirect the desire for social justice, the post-woke mind is much more alert to other movements that could try to misdirect our inherent impulse towards good things like individualism, fairness, compassion and so on. The post-woke continues to oppose wokeism, as originally defined, but they also turn the same critical analysis on other political factions and movements, including those which claim to be anti-woke, because they are aware that bad ideas, the lure of authoritarianism, and politics with an intent to manipulate people emotionally, don't just come in one flavor.
I believe that, to truly move beyond wokeness, we need to understand where it went wrong. In my mind, the main difference between an anti-woke stance and a post-woke stance is that anti-woke only tries to 'attack' wokeness by doing the opposite of what it appears to demand, while post-woke actually aims to resolve the problem by correcting where wokeness went wrong, and putting things right again, so that we can move forward having conquered this obstacle.
So what is wokeness? While the term is now overused and has lost much of its clarity, going back to the way it was used before, we can argue that it refers to approaches to social change and activism rooted in postmodernism, critical theory, and adjacent ideas. These ideas are problematic because they often pit one group against another, and provide excuses for practices like cancel culture. The reason why they became popular was because they were offered as a ticket to improving social justice, even though this is clearly a false promise that can never be fulfilled. Hence, looking at it from a bigger picture perspective, wokeness is a misdirection of the impulse for social justice, that has driven a desire for compassion and fairness into its opposite, via a lot of misguided theory and philosophy. The misdirection of social justice into its opposite has caused both a well-justified backlash to postmodernism and critical theory, as well as a reactionary backlash to all social justice aims in general, with both parts of the backlash packaged into a broad 'anti-woke' movement. The overall effect of wokeness is therefore the confusion and defeat of social justice, as well as things like cancel culture, polarization, and the division of people by immutable characteristics.
As I just said, the biggest problem with wokeness is that it has turned the desire for social justice into its opposite. One of the most important ways this happens is through the routine description of certain groups as 'privileged', as in 'white privilege' or 'male privilege'. This is morally wrong for two reasons: firstly, to label a whole group of people, based on an immutable characteristic, is effectively an act of deliberately obscuring the differences in individual cases, which is very dehumanizing. This is clearly harmful from a justice point of view, if we are to truly care about there being justice for every individual. But even more importantly, to label a whole group of people as having unearned privilege is effectively an act of inviting people to treat them less favorably. To label people as privileged effectively says it is OK to treat them less well, less decently, less fairly. This psychological effect is undeniable, and is indeed consistent with some of what has been observed in real life in 'very woke' social circles in recent years.
The negative effects of calling people 'privileged' based on immutable characteristics may start with the groups being called privileged, but it surely doesn't end there either. Ultimately, the important thing here isn't which specific groups are being called 'privileged'. Rather, the important thing is that the normative value of treating everyone with the same decency and compassion, and the taboo against differential treatment of people based on membership of groups, are shattered. Once it becomes acceptable to treat people badly based on group-based perceptions, it can then apply in any direction, towards any group. Postmodern critical theory itself of course doesn't intend to allow this, as it clearly defines which groups are supposed to be 'oppressors' and which are 'oppressed' based on its analysis of history. However, human nature doesn't work like that, and there are strong evolutionary psychology reasons why people generally insist that the same rules and same conditions apply to everyone. Therefore, once postmodern critical theory breaks the normative values of liberalism, it unavoidably opens the floodgates to racism and bigotry in every direction. This is why, I believe, the rise of woke culture is the actual cause behind the recent rise in racism and bigotry across the Western world. This actually means we must put an end to woke culture if we want to end the current wave of bigotry targeted at minorities. This kind of analysis has sometimes been rendered taboo in so-called progressive circles, but it is clearly well justified, and I believe we need to give it much more attention if we want to make things better.
The other main problem with wokeness is that it often disrespects people's freedom of conscience and independent thinking. This is where things like cancel culture and deplatforming come from. This phenomenon, again, is rooted in theories based on postmodernism and critical theory. The overall worldview of these theories is that almost everything is changeable because they are all 'social constructs', and the barrier to radical progress is the current culture and its institutions, which form a power structure serving the interests of the oppressor groups against the oppressed. In this worldview, there is effectively no respect for the fact that people have an ability to think for themselves, and also no respect for the fact that people have reliable ways to discern the objective truth, even if they might be imperfect and might take some time. The denial of free thinking and free speech, as well as the denial of the importance of objectivity, are all clearly bad for justice, as history has shown.
As you can see, woke culture has been able to turn the desire of social justice into its opposite, through the application of theories rooted in the philosophies broadly described as postmodernism and critical theory. Therefore, the solution to stop this process from happening is to stop people who are passionate about social justice from embracing these faulty theories and believing in what they have to say. I think this can be best achieved by emphasizing certain values, which are a natural part of pro-social justice thinking, but are also an antidote to what is proposed in these theories. The values I propose are decency, fairness and genuineness. By demanding that decency and fairness be upheld at all times, there will be no room for things like calling people 'privileged' based solely on group membership. By demanding that genuineness and fairness be respected, there will be no room for things like cancel culture. The rise of woke culture reflects the failure of social justice advocates to uphold these values in the recent past, and the unconditional re-embrace of these values will rectify the problem. Therefore, I believe that decency, fairness and genuineness should be the three core post-woke values, the values that will lead us away from the mess created by woke culture.