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Series Theme:  "Culture Wars"

Chapter 6: The Heart of the War - Woke

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CONTENTS:

 

PART 6.1 Three Resources to enlighten us

Resources

 

PART 6.2  Some Additional Comments on Woke

Back to Definitions of Woke?

Political Ideology or Moral Undermining?

A Fertile Field of History

A Satanic Copycat

    

Introduction: Initially I was going to deal with ‘woke' in the definitions in the previous chapter, but the more I read, the more I realized that in many ways the ideology that is behind woke is the all-important issue behind which everything else follows. In this chapter we will refer to three modern books in order to try to bring some measure of enlightenment to us and catch the flavour and sense of what they convey. We will spend a little time examining what they say in order to see just how significant this has become in recent decades.

 

If you have never read into this area or your understanding is limited, you will need to take a deep breath, pray, and then dig in for some serious reading. This is not a comfortable area but if you can persevere in this chapter, you will see something of the reality of what has been taking place in society (and leaking over into the Church) in recent decades.

 

We're going to read of expressions or activities of ‘woke activists', (to catch a sense of the problem) and only then go on to define it, to hopefully end up with a clearer view. For some this may be a hard chapter to read and understand but, we would suggest, a vitally essential one. Please persevere with it – after you've prayed!

 

 

PART 6.1 Three Resources to enlighten us

 

Resources: So ‘hot' has this subject become that it has produced a great outpouring of books that vary in style and depth. We will simply take quotes from THREE books that have come out in recent years:

 

i) “Woke Racism – How a New Religion has betrayed Black America” by John McWhorter, published in 2021. McWhorter is black and very anti-woke. We will not agree with his portrayal of Woke as a religion (and his calling woke activists, ‘The Elect') but we understand his approach, which is that this new ‘religion' hurts black people. It is a book all about woke expression as racism. His style of writing is not always easy to follow, and as the title says it is really about the black experience in America. He makes the interesting challenge that we will not get through to these people. (But persevere anyway.) What he is good at, is citing illustrations and some of what he says we may find helpful so, for example he speaks of three waves of antiracism in the States:

- first wave that challenged segregation,

- second wave – that we should all work to see black people as equal to whites

- third wave (where it really starts getting uncomfortable today) that demands

  - comments such as “I don't see colour,” are seen as racist,

  - if you are white you should see yourself as enjoying ‘white privilege',

  - that you must accept claims that make no sense (yes, we will deal with this in the chapter on Race, slavery etc.!) He declares,

“if you venture any genuine pushback, you are tarred on social media as a racist.”

“they say that they are pursuing social justice thus telling the rest of us that we are resisting social justice.”

 

As an example of how all this works, he wrote as follows:

“A friend wrote on Facebook that they agree with Black Lives Matter, only to be roasted by an anonymous person: “Wait a minute! You ‘agree' with them? That implies you get to disagree with them! That's like saying you agree with the law of gravity! You as a white person don't get to ‘agree' OR ‘disagree' when black people assert something! Saying you ‘agree' with them is EVERY bit as arrogant as disputing them! This isn't an intellectual exercise! This is THEIR lives on the line!”

Follow that arguing if you can!

 

When woke and race are put together they produce ‘Critical race theory' which McWhorter maintains started among a certain group of legal scholars a few decades ago. Citing one of these scholars he says he,

“began teaching non-whites to base their complaints about injustice not on something so ‘rigid' as objective truth, but upon the broad story of dashed hopes and centuries long mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and cultural background of your complaint.”

[In the later Chapter on Racism we shall see how these latter sentences are untrue and biased so as to create an environment of conflict.]

   

He continued,

  

“This kind of argument was the source of the one now so familiar, that if a brown person says they have encountered racism, then it is automatically indisputable that they did, and if you don't agree it makes you ‘problematic'.”

  

(He also explains why what a person says they feel happened is not necessarily true!)

   

Later he continues

”Critical race theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses – and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining below decks in chains.”

 

After examining racial woke ideology as a religion and why it has followers, he identifies the following mistruths that woke racist activists put forward:

•  Unequal outcomes equal unequal opportunity – not necessarily!

•  Slavery is hushed up in America – definitely not!

•  Historical figures who weren't woke on race must be cancelled – really???

 

In a later chapter, dismissing the woke goal of dismantling structures, he suggests that in America the following would be better as a means of properly changing society: “there should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way; and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college education.”

 

He goes on to warn us that this woke activist ideology, “is not amenable to constructive discussion they will deny the charge, but what they mean by discussion is that we will learn their wisdom.” If we invite them to carefully consider our attitude to free speech, he suggests, “to the elect, this sounds like calling for paedophiles to allow their ‘diverse' point of view. Most of us would say paedophilia is particularly abhorrent in how perniciously it acts upon another person. To the elect, power differentials and their results are the same kind of harm, and we cannot understand what we are up against with these people without fully comprehending that.”

 

A black intellectual, teacher and writer. We hope you've caught the flavour of this expression of wokeism in respect of race.

    

 

ii) “How Woke Won – The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason” by Joanna Williams, a journalist and author, published 2022, is the second of our three books. This is very much a middle-of-the-road book, at first sight a much easier and straight forward read, but more complex the more you get into it. Just to take a few chapter headings – A Brief History of Woke, Politicising Children, Thought Crimes, the New Racism, the Weaponisation of Victimhood – gives us sense of the much broader and comprehensive approach of this book.

  

If you weren't sure of the significance of woke, the opening sentence in her Introduction may suggest that you have some serious reading to do: “Woke has conquered the West. From schools and universities to multinational corporations, social media, journalism, and even the police and military, woke values dominate every aspect of our lives.”

  

Continuing her introduction she writes,

  

“On Joe Biden's first day as U.S. President he signed an executive order permitting boys who identify as girls to compete on female sports teams and enter female changing rooms. Statues of former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt had been torn down by protesters amid claims the statues were racially demeaning. Companies like Ben and Jerry's, Nike and L'Oreal have backed the Black Lives Matter movement. Premier League football players still routinely take the knee before matches kick off. Britain's most exclusive fee paying schools have introduced gender-neutral school uniforms while the famous St. Paul's Girls' School in London have gone one better and abolished the title of ‘head girl' following concerns that it was ‘too binary'.”

And so it could go on. Later in the Introduction she continues:

  

“Cancel culture is not about criticism and the exercise of free speech. It is not a call for debate, but a demand that transgressors be removed from social media and public life more broadly. This ruthless, censorious approach to anything that offends woke sensibilities extends to the past, with calls to remove statues and replace street names. Extends into all areas of culture, as episodes of once popular television programmes or children's books are expunged from the public record. Yet when critics push back against its defensive and authoritarian regime, they are told there is nothing going on other than a valiant battle for social justice.”

 

To get down to basics she writes,

  

“Woke values aim to promote social justice through the fore-grounding of identity politics. This entails categorising people according to immutable characteristics such as race or sex, before dividing and ranking them according to assumed hierarchies of oppression.”

  

She later continues:

  

“Woke values now extend far into established social and cultural institutions. This has happened not because of the strength of woke ideas, but because institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Schools, universities, museums, and the media are no longer driven by an imperative to impart knowledge, to pursue truth, to preserve the past or to cultivate beauty. These important values were problematised and rejected a long time ago. Woke ideas have, far more recently, provided those in charge of national institutions with a new sense of purpose.”

   

In respect of Culture Wars, writing about American sociologist James Davison Hunter, she notes that he points to “the emergence of two distinct groups, which he labels the progressives and the orthodox. He argues that, for progressives, political authorities stems from a morality that is fluid and context dependent, whereas for the orthodox, moral authority remains absolute, despite changing social and economic circumstances.”

 

She goes on to explain how these changes have been working in the culture wars of today. From a Christian perspective, that holds to absolutes, that is significant. Note also, therefore, the phrase, “morality that is fluid and context dependent”.

 

Further she writes about how,

“The culture war is about projecting woke values, through a particular interpretation of history and culture, onto society at large. This cultural shift becomes a ‘war' because it is imposed, top-down, by a new elite on the majority of citizens. The elite imposition of work values is interpreted by many as an attack on national identity, patriotism and tradition. But they find themselves dismissed whenever they raised their concerns…. The BBC frequently acts in such a way that reflects the views and interests of a woke elite, rather than the bulk of the population.”

 

In chapter 7 on Culture we will see a number of warnings by earlier writers about these ‘elites', but who are they? In a somewhat unclear chapter given over to this very subject, she appears to identify them as people who lead or who tend to be high up in a vast spectrum of institutions or organisations, who are very often young and invariably left wing, people of influence. As she says “in the past, being radically left wing put you on the fringes of society. Today it is where cultural power lies.”

 

In terms of the values that the woke community espouse she writes (and I restructure for clarity):

“It is possible to identify a set of woke values that many within the cultural elite spouse. This might include:
•  the belief that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are structurally endemic
•  that white people are inherently privileged and are racist if they deny this
•  gender identity is more important to a person's sense of themselves than their sex
•  that Britain's past is a source of shame
•  that national borders are an oppressive construct
•  that community and tradition are aggressive fictions
•  that masculinity is toxic
•  and that most people are mentally vulnerable.
Most fundamentally, the cultural elite share an assumption that we all have identity-based, historically accumulated privileges and disadvantages. We must all learn where to position ourselves and others within an intersectional hierarchy of privilege and oppression, and performatively support those less privileged than ourselves. The new elite authority comes from acting on behalf of the oppressed.”

And that only takes is about a quarter of the way through her book, but the rest we will have to leave to you to read if you so wish. What we have quoted so far, we hope, starts a painting-by-numbers which, although incomplete, gives something of the sense of the whole picture.

     

  

iii) “Counter Wokecraft – A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond”, by Charles Pincourt (a pseudonym for an American University professor), a thin book of less than a hundred pages, published in 2021, for, in the author's own words, “academics in an academic environment, although I believe much can be transferred to other work environments.” Not wanting to quote too much from such a slim volume, we will simply pick out quotes that we hope may add to that already written to clarify or expand understanding.

    

Speaking of the woke worldview he notes that

  

“while reality itself is not denied or questioned, it is considered impossible for us to know its true nature. The reason it's impossible for us to know about reality's true nature is that any knowledge we think we have is actually only ‘socially constructed' defined (through language) by the culture in which we live.”

He later records,

“Not only is knowledge socially constructed, but knowledge is constructed by oppressor groups in society at the expense of oppressed groups…. Knowledge is constructed in such a way that it helped maintain the oppressive role for oppressor groups and to prevent oppressed groups being liberated from their oppression.”

We note in passing that in the past this would be the sort of language that Communist ideology might use in respect of the ruling class versus the proletariat. The langue of oppressor and oppressed is at the heart of woke activity. It is very much a political ideology but one that spreads like a plague into the areas of morality, spirituality, and truth. We cover it as extensively as we do so that you will be under no illusions – the world has been at war! This is what has ALREADY been happening.

 

Still portraying the woke worldview he notes that,

“white people for example, simply can't help but behave in ways that perpetuate their oppression over non-white people in society. Importantly it also implies black people behave in such a way that perpetuate their oppression, although from a different perspective and that is one reason they behave differently than white people…. white people, male and heterosexual, are considered not to experience oppression but rather privilege.”

 

Commenting on what he perceives as the Woke Political Project the author observes,

  

“The woke worldview and ethos has gelled around the following political project; the retributive redistribution of resource according to group identity known as ‘equity'. The redistribution is intended to flow from ‘oppressor' groups to historically ‘oppressed' groups.”

 

‘Woke-craft' he defines as ‘ covert strategies and techniques to be used by the activist'. He suggests they are used when

- participants (the activists) have decision-making abilities at events,

- there are ‘sites' of oppression (people or situations where they perceive oppression),

- ‘problematizing' is the bringing to awareness of the oppression (to cause upset),

- goals are to be set that can include change of language or of behaviour within an institution,

- a crucial goal is the create acceptance of Critical Social Justice perspective.

 

These things, he suggests, come about by

- continually trying, working for it,

- using the least amount of force necessary to achieve the goal,

- trying to go unnoticed until it is too late,

- long term goals should not be threatened by short term (perhaps more obvious) advances,

- essentially the end justifies means used,

- these may include subterfuge, exaggerating support, and quelling dissent.

 

To spot woke-craft before it is too late, he suggests,

- take it seriously – it is happening,

- be as familiar with it as possible,

- be vigilant,

- watch for the use of woke words.

 

To stop or hinder the process, he suggests

- if you see something, say something,

- remain suspicious and sceptical,

- always have an alternative to propose,

- never let them add their words

etc.

 

He further proposes you

- identify work participants (who won't be allies)

- identify allies and work with allies

- work on a series of ways to oppose.

 

Without doubt that is a fighting manual that sees the whole woke enterprise as a political battle that uses injustice and oppression for its own ends. Remember this is an American college professor who has been watching and living this for some years and is now simply recording what he sees has been happening.

 

 

PART 6.2 Some Additional Comments on Woke

 

Back to Definitions of Woke? In case the three books have left us a little breathless, let's step back with some simple definition work. To quote from one source:

“Woke was officially added into the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective in June 2017. The dictionary defines it as “originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”. The Urban Dictionary, which published its original definition two years prior to the official dictionary, defines it as “being woke means being aware… knowing what's going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)”. In other words, it means to be awake to sensitive social issues, such as racism.”

   

So the term “woke” mostly refers to someone concerned with social issues such as race and trans rights. However, it is rarely that simple, as we have seen in this chapter, for more often than not it is used as a weapon in modern verbal conflicts, and so often involves using past wrongs to redirect society today – not always for good.

 

One writer concluded, “Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident.” i.e. using unusual language of conflict in ways that imply the listener is ignorant of it.” Hmmm!

 

Political Ideology or Moral Undermining? Both. Again and again the far left is seen as the part of the political spectrum from which this originates, and the third book above clearly sees the operation of woke ideology as a political takeover with major societal and moral overtones.

 

A Fertile Field of History: I recently came across the following description: “at the turn of the 20th century, the Russian empire was a lumbering agrarian colossus that had fallen far behind for the industrialising states of Western Europe in economic terms. The empire's population comprised many different ethnic groups including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Jews, Finns, and Germans - only 40% of whom spoke Russian. The empire was ruled over by an absolutist czar Nicholas II, and a strict social hierarchy was ruthlessly enforced. There was no free press, no freedom of speech or association, no minority rights and few political rights. Unsurprisingly in this atmosphere of repression, revolutionary forces were gaining an ever stronger foothold, and they would finally be carried to victory in the 1917 October revolution by the political agitator named Vladimir Lenin.”

Marx & Engels, having written ‘The Communist Manifesto' in 1848, provided the fuel for a new way of thinking that would appeal to the masses. The rest is history. Clearly there WAS massive oppression that was wrong. Indeed one has only to look at kaisers and czars to find pomp and arrogance on a monumental scale that brought about ‘a war to end all wars' (!!!) and a revolution that would one day open the door to millions to be killed under the reign of a king without a crown – Stalin, during whose regime historians reckon some 9 million died – not by accident!

 

When Che Guevara declared, “there is no other definition of communism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man”, no doubt many would have added, “Amen!” perhaps especially from the Woke camp, but history shows that, in the fallen world that we realistically face as Christians, we know that is hopeless optimism.

 

A Satanic Copycat: Oppression and injustice are two of the many sins of fallen mankind and saying that is not complacency but realism. When Jesus Christ came and proclaimed, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,   because he has anointed me   to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour,” (Lk 4:18,10), the Messiah's mandate from Isa 61, it was the perfect expression of the heart of God for mankind, both in terms of the salvation every person needs and the working out of life on earth.

 

The cries of communism, and now of the woke ideology, in retrospect, appear to be disguises for sinful men and women to express their upset with the world while still remaining sinners who are bad as anyone else and who fail to present something that provides a real answer to the needs of mankind as a whole – which we will consider more fully in this series.

 

The records are too well documented to be denied so that the likes of Vladimir Putin and his associates at the heart of Russia in the twenty-first century indicate that, for all their fine words, greed and corruption is still at the heart of communism and, if the papers are to be believed, in the hearts of some of those purporting to be fighting for the oppressed.

 

When Satan came to tempt Jesus before the start of his ministry, he sought to encourage him to take short cuts to achieve his goal of saving the world. Perhaps a realistic look at Communism, and now woke ideology, would suggest that his same short-cut-but-guaranteed-to-fail strategy is still alive and kicking.

   

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