Woke is not the left

I’ve noticed something. It’s a private tendency but one you might share. When someone starts using terms like: “The patriarchy”;“toxic masculinity”;“social construct”; I tend to switch off, even though I believe in all of these things. I assume the person is part of the woke cult, so I’m expecting any conversation to be as nuanced as a slap in the face, and I switch off. Sadly, I’m switching off more and more.

What is woke culture? Wokeness is born from sections of the socials sciences that know nothing about science and even less about society. Like any political term, it’s meant different things to different people. So let’s attempt a definition. What I’m referring to here is the modern tendency to:

1) See the world via power relations between identity groups.

2) Assume a ‘blank slate’ idea of humans.

This second point, the denial of human nature and of genetics role in shaping our behaviour is often baked deep into the wokesters world view. So deep, I’m not even sure if they’re awake enough to know they assume it. Again and again I see disagreements that really just come down to these underlying assumptions.

So let’s examine the woke assumptions. TRIGGER WARNING: the following passages contain nuance.

If you believe genes don’t affect behaviour, consider the new born joey kangaroo, born knowing how to crawl into its mothers pouch. Or consider the baby turtles instinctively heading for water. If genes encode such specific behaviours in other animals why can’t we accept they can effect our own behaviour? For example studies on identical twins, separated at birth, suggest genes even effect our political leanings. Perhaps being a wokester is genetic?

A favourite catchphrase of the woke is: “gender is a socially construct”. To muddy the waters here, people sometimes use the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ distinctly and sometimes synonymously. Let’s settle on sex being physical manifestations and gender referring to the roles, behaviours, and social expectations.

This sounds pretty socially constructed right? Well yes, partially. However many gender differences are not simply cross cultural but in fact cross species. (for example male chimps are more aggressive that female chimps).Here’s where wokeness exposes its many contradictions. Wokeness asserts gender is a social construct but don’t you dare try deny that a biological man can be born feeling like a woman.

At this stage, you may be thinking:

• How can someone be born feeling they are in the wrong social construct?
• What’s are the roles of hormones in socially constructing you?
• What do these people think genes actually do?
• Is it all a conspiracy of the patriarchy?

The truth is that gender is a mixture of nature and nurture. You can be trans because gender is something far deeper than a social construct.

What about race, is that a social construct? Again partly. Race is a fuzzy idea, made even fuzzier in a globalised world. Just a few generations past, people would date, not just within their race but within their village. Fitting people in tight racial boxes makes less and less sense. But to say race is completely constructed is still ridiculous. A recent DNA test was able to assert I was white and Irish. If two such people had a child and the resultant child looked Chinese, African, Arab or Inuit, should they perhaps ask if their was a mix up at the ward or just shrug it off as a social construct? Wokeness constantly uses this post modern sophistry: because a category is fuzzy, it’s non-existent. The category of ‘chairs’ is fuzzy. Do chairs therefore, not exist? Should wokesters sit on the floor?

At the stage you might be wondering if social constructs are socially constructed. Pointing out something as a “social construct” is a core woke tactic. I recently heard a wokster, stand up in a debate and declare that money is a social construct and thus a fairytale. A couple of points about this:

1. Firstly stating the obvious as if it’s a revelation, is kind of arrogant. People don’t think their credit cards are made of magic plastic. Everybody knows money is a construct. That’s how we construct it.

2. Pointing out something has no physical manifestation does not magically undermine its impact or its utility.

Ok so this stuff is largely nonsense but why should we care? Several reasons. Let me examine each in turn:

Wokness allows the left to be ridiculed & caricatured

You know the left has gone astray when you start to agree with Fox news. The terms libtard and snowflakes abound on the right and you know what? They’re not always wrong. I once witnessed a woke friend who is biologically female, looks female and identifies as female, get offended when someone used a pronoun, assuming she was female. It’s getting silly in Wokeland. The right wing media use fringe behaviour to say: “look what these lefty fools are doing. Imagine what would happen if you voted for them?”

Wokness allows the broader left movement to ridiculed caricatured and ultimately, dismissed.

Wokness turns natural allies against the left.

George Orwell said : “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” Wokeness is very intellectual. All sorts of woke arguments spring out of the social sciences as to why your identity is some sort of intersectional construct making you a sinner or a saint. It’s all very complex, mostly bullshit and regular people know it. Working people are fleeing the Democrats in America. UK conservatives are taking seats they could only have dreamed of just 10 years ago. The right is rising across Europe while the left is staying woke. If you are a white person, born into poverty being shouted at by an elite college educated wokester to “check your privilege”, you might start to wonder where your privilege is. People feel whatever their identity, its not wokeness and if wokeness is what the left is becoming, they aren’t left anymore.

Wokeness promotes intolerance and original sin.

Wokeness dehumanises members of groups it sees as powerful, thereby validating prejudice against them. Identity sin is big with the woksters and there are no bigger sinners that those evil enough to be born white, male and straight. Consider the particularly heartless article in the UK Guardian which claimed conservative leader David Cameron had felt only “privileged pain” over the death of his son. Whatever you think of the mans politics this canary in the coal mine moment, was particularly callous.

Dissent is not tolerated in this cult, and context is not considered. The wokesters will find that youtube video of you at 14, using the N-word, while singing along to Dr Dre.

To highlight naked misandry, in 2017 Helen Pluckrose, Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle wrote a series papers. One named: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” blamed this “conceptual penis” on everything from rape and abuse of marginalised groups to climate change. Journals encouraged them to “problematize” maleness more and several papers were published. Perhaps masculinity isn’t the only thing that can get a little toxic?

One paper called: “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice” was based on Mein Kampf by well known liberal, Adolf Hitler. This is how intolerant the wokesters have become.

If you think these are isolated cases, consider the notorious Evergreen college incident. Sparked by an annual “Day of absence”, where people of colour were asked to take the day off in order to highlight everything they do for society. Some genius thought to instead ask white people to stay away. When Professor Bret Weinstein highlighted the stupidity of this, he was accused of racism. The accusation wasn’t based on any evidence or even on Weinstein’s behaviour but eh…you know, white guy…so eh…yeah. Weinstein, a left leaning Jewish man was not woke enough for the woke. The situation escalated to the point of gangs of students patrolling the college with weapons looking for Weistein. If you think wokness is a trivial passing trend, I urge you to watch Mike Nayna documentary on the incident. It plays out like a modern version of the Salem witch trials.

Wokness does not learn from these incidents because no movement that suppresses dissent can learn. In a crisis, the woke look for traitors while the right look for allies.

Wokness empowers the far right.

People will always ask questions like: are men and women in some ways different? Can cultural groups hold damaging beliefs? The tendency of wokeness to shut these conversations down, means they reappear in the far right corners of the web where they are used to justify sexism, racism and hyper nationalism.

Here we see a well meaning but flawed assumption of the woke: if we acknowledge differences between groups, we encourage discrimination. The woke don’t want to listen to biologists like Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein or psychologist Steven Pinker deliver fairly moderate claims within a genuinely scientific frame work. Wokeness sees these people as a gate way the far right, this is exactly wrong, they are the antidote.

As Martin Luther King said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that”.

Wokness dilutes terms like racism and sexism.

I’ve heard the assertion “only white people can be racist” dropped quite casually. Presumably only white men, I haven’t asked. Wokesters are fighting racism by being racist against people they assume to be a racist based on their race.

Calling someone racist has become the modern equivalent of calling someone a witch. Let’s throw them in the water and see if they swim. If being white means you are racist (the woke version of “original sin”) then what do we call actual racists? If we no longer have the nuance in language to distinguish between swastika bearing nazis and Bret Weinstein, then how do we deal with actual prejudice? If tyranny is the suppression of nuance, then wokeness is tyrannical.

Wokeness drains focus from the left.

After the 2008 and crash I was talking to my Dad, about how bad things might get. My Dad was born in Ireland at the start of WWII. Momentarily unchecking his white privelage, he said when he was young, kids had sores on their face from malnutrition and many didn’t have shoes. This isn’t a problem in Ireland anymore but still is in much of the world. I’ve often wondered if wokeness is just wealthy people getting more and more angry about less and less important things.

Poverty has been the main concern of the left since the term was coined in the French revolution. Addressing poverty matters. Addressing your whether gender fluid, non binary, pan-sexual, tri-racial mate…with a limp, has been the victim of a workplace micro aggression, is just not that important. We need to get our priorities straight.

Wokness separates us into identities.

Personally I think Black history month is a good idea. However something resonated when I heard the calming voice of Morgan Freeman, explaining why he doesn’t want a Black history month.

“Black history is American history…..I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”

Wokeness continually tells us that race and gender are simply social constructs while at the same time being the most the most important things about us. Ironically wokness reinforces what it is trying to dismantle.

In the west, racism and sexism are diminished but not vanquished. The left should unite us through our commonalities not divide us through our differences.

What we should we do about it:

Well, firstly, you should understand and challenge the assumptions underlying wokeness.

We should stand up against sexism and racism regardless of the race or sex of the perpetrators.

The truth is that there are some small differences between the sexes.

The truth is that we are complex tangle of nature and nurture.

The truth is you are more than your cis/trans or black/white or whatever identity group wokeness assigns you to.

And NONE of this makes a difference because we should judge people as individuals not on whatever group woke assigns you to.

We seek equal opportunity, not because we’re all the same but because that’s what’s decent.

Say it with me now: “woke is not the left”

“Those who are easily offended should be offended more often.” — Mae West.