"Wokeness - An American Cultural Revolution?"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Wokeness – An American Cultural Revolution?”

August 9, 2020

 

“The problem with wokeness is that it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it. To be woke is first

 and foremost to put yourself on display. To make a problem seem massively intractable

 is to inspire separation – building a wall between you and the problem – not a solution.”

                                                                                                            David Brooks

                                                                                                            New York Times

                                                                                                            June 7, 2018

 

It may seem hyperbolic and overly provocative to refer to the “wokeness” that has permeated our society as a cultural revolution; for it brings to mind China’s Cultural Revolution that lasted ten years and caused, perhaps, twenty million lives. On the other hand, it may prove to be longer lasting but less deadly, more like the Romanticists of the 19^th Century, who questioned the intellectual foundations of Enlightenment-derived, reason-based western culture. Like then, todays “woke” have abandoned liberalism and objective truth for narratives and stories based on the belief we live in a Marxian world of oppressors and oppressed.

 

Wokeness: noun, a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality. (Definition provided by the Cambridge English Dictionary.) That definition sounds harmless. We should all be concerned about social problems, helping the needy, playing fair, being respectful and applying the Golden Rule. But wokeness steps across the line. It takes its ideology from “critical theory,” a social philosophy that stems from Karl Marx and the 1930s Frankfurt School. Critical theory offers social justice in place of real justice. It challenges traditional power centers; though it does not permit challenges to its own structure. To be woke, in this sense, is to be awake to the concept that what matters is diversity of identities, not ideas – that, for example, all blacks, all gays, all women should express ideas based on identity, not individual thought. Individual opinions are seen as oppressive. Black conservatives are anomalous, in that it is claimed they support white oppression. (I suspect, however, if one asked Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Alveda King, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Tim Scott or scores of other Black conservatives if that were true, the accusation would be denied.)

 

Wokeness divides people into victims and victimizers. Black failure, therefore, is due to “systemic” racism, not individual shortcomings. Qualities that lead to success, such as hard work and two-parent households, are said to be examples of a white-dominant culture, not universal truths. Wokeness is a philosophy of denial, in that it shuns individual accomplishments and failures. It is, in fact, a reactionary philosophy. Andrew Sullivan of The Weekly Dish recently described it: “liberalism [classical] can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice.” Those who claim “wokeness” say their decisions are based on science, but when facts do not accord to prescribed narratives they are not open to disagreement or debate. For example, in the climate wars, they accuse opponents of ignoring science, yet it is they who shun debate. These same tactics have been resurrected during the current pandemic. “Unfettered dialogue isn’t a liberal-arts luxury,” wrote Vivek Ramaswamy in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal; “it is a necessity for science and democracy.”

 

What we are witnessing, while discomfiting, is not new. As mentioned above, it has ancestral roots in 19^th Century Romanticism, which was, in part, a backlash against the Enlightenment – against reason, in favor of mysticism and emotion. As well, in his autobiographical book, A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell foresaw in 1969 what we see today: “Where there is little attention paid to reasoned arguments about legitimate problems and a total capitulation to force, ‘moderate’ or ‘rational’ leadership cannot deliver the results that more uninhibited leadership can deliver.” What is new (and scary) is the rapidity with which corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, the media, the entertainment industries, unions and politicians from both political parties, in a desire to be seen as woke, have jumped on board this illiberal bandwagon.

 

There is hypocrisy in this virtue signaling. Keep in mind, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself as a “trained Marxist.” In their statement of belief, they say they are “self-reflexive and do the work to dismantle cisgender privilege” and “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Yet our lives have improved because of capitalism, and most of us who are white never realized that being cisgender or being raised in a traditional two-parent family was white privilege. Goldman Sachs, in refusing to take public any company that does not have at least one minority board member, sets itself as the sole arbiter as to who counts as diverse. Nike claims wokeness, yet they employ 600 or so Uighurs working in forced labor camps in China.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first-rate intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.” For example, slavery was a sin of American history, yet it is also true that the 13^th Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865, abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude.” Over 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War to end slavery. Jim Crow laws ended with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. have been repealed for over fifty years. Public approval of interracial marriage rose from 5% in the 1950s to 80% in the 2000s. Mixed-race marriages were less than one percent of all marriages in 1960; today they represent over 15 percent. We may have further to go, but progress has been made. Being woke ignores such advances – that no matter historical facts, their claim is we remain a systemically racist nation. Being woke means not allowing opposing ideas. It is a pessimistic view of the future. In the same op-ed quoted in the rubric, David Brooks wrote: “…it’s a blunt fact that most great social reforms have happened in moments of optimism, not moments of pessimism, in moments of encouraging progress, not in moments of perceived threat.”

 

The most striking thing about “wokeness” is how illiberal it is. In its essence, it is Marxist. Like Black Lives Matter, it sets one group of people against another, and it tolerates the violence of Antifa. It requires followers to hew to a preordained narrative, spouting Orwellian truths. It subscribes to “cancel culture,” removing from the historical record that which is not supportive of its aims. It provides the false security of “safe places” and denies politically incorrect speech, for fear that free speech might inspire the curiosity of the inquisitive. It arose in universities and now, within a frightening short time, is consuming our lives, in a bedlam of virtue signaling, letting science and universal truths sink into the abyss of a new dark age. Is this a true cultural revolution? Where will it lead us? Will democracy withstand it? How will it end?

 

 

 

 

 

"More Statues, Not Fewer"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“More Statues, Not Fewer”

June 28, 2020

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny

and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

                                                                                                George Orwell (1903-1950)

                                                                                                1984, 1949

Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”   

Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.

Civilizations in other places have materialized and dissipated: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, Mexico and Peru. All collapsed. None offered the universal freedom and respect for the individual’s rights embedded in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. One can find fault in the Declaration, as its soaring rhetoric did not include women, and slavery was still a fact of life. Nevertheless, it was a revolutionary document. And it should be judged against customs and standards of the time. How free were women in England, Germany, China or Japan at that time? Slavery, then, existed most everywhere, including Africa, and it still does in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Context counts when passing judgement on past lives and customs.

A genius of the Founding Fathers was their creation of a government with limited power, a concept necessary for liberty, but one fragile, as it conflicts with man’s instinct for power. They gave us a government that permits free speech, the right to assemble and to protest. We have the freedom to worship as we may. In terms of behavior, we have rights to march, but we also have property rights and the right to defend what is ours. We have a government based on the rule of law, not men, and that relies on civility, tolerance and mutual respect, designed to hear diverse opinions. It has worked for almost 250 years. We must keep it. Its strength is not its military; it is not a powerful executive or a wise judicial branch. Its strength is its people, whose collective wisdom is gained through independent thinking, not propaganda that stems from “group think,” where illiberal ideas today are nurtured in universities, promoted by the media, supported by the entertainment and sports world and executed by government bureaucrats.

We live in a frightening time. In the name of inclusion and diversity, we exclude those whose opinions differ from what has been sanctioned by the “thought police.” In seeking diversity of skin color and sex, we get conformity of ideas that demand allegiance to the “Party.” We have fomented a culture that “cancels” history and divides people into victims and oppressors. Through BLM and terrorist groups like Antifa, and our willing acceptance of their demands, we are led away from liberty into the darkness of totalitarianism. What is happening is manifested in mobs that desecrate and tear down remnants of our past. Writing in The Times of London last week, Gerard Baker noted: “It’s still surprisingly little understood that BLM wants a revolution: defunding the police, dismantling the institutions of capitalism and white supremacy.” We see elected officials, who forego responsibility to public safety and bow to mob demands. Recently, we witnessed the Speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats don Ghanian Kente cloth scarfs and kneel on the Capitol steps, in eight minutes and forty-six seconds of hypocritical silence to a man who should not have died as he did. This desire to be “woke” extended to the Head of my old school. In a recent e-mail, he called for inclusion and an end to hate speech and racism, while saying nothing of the need for excellence in scholarship, or the right of free speech, including diversity of opinion.  “The racial divide,” as Victor Davis Hanson wrote two weeks ago, “will not be healed by black separatist tribalism.”

Of course, Black lives matter, including that of George Floyd, but also the 97% of Black murder victims who, according to the Washington Post, were killed by other Blacks in 2015. As well, we pray that the lives of the 70% of Black children born every year into father-less families will matter. In truth, all lives matter, just as all voices need to be heard, not just those in fashion. But those who tear down monuments and destroy history remove any sense of how man has changed over time. Ours is a troubled era. We need voices to call out: Slow down and think about what is being said and done! In a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois in 1838, a twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Evil needs to be suppressed, even when done by those who profess to be doing good.

What is needed is a positive message of universal affirmation, that acknowledges imperfections but is not ashamed of who we are and what has been accomplished. We need more monuments and statues, not fewer. We need them of recent heroes, like Thurgood Marshall and Edward Brooke, to add to those erected yesterday. It allows our descendants to see how we evolve toward a fairer, freer and more equitable society.

And we must keep in mind that every sculpture and monument is a work of art. Michelangelo once said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Whether the four faces on Mount Rushmore represent the four greatest Americans who ever lived is a matter of personal opinion. But we can all admire the talent and effort of Gutzon Borglum in producing that monument. My parents were sculptors. They worked in marble, granite and clay. They produced what they thought was (and is) beautiful. Politics never entered the equation. Most of what they produced was small – busts of children and statuettes of horses. My father did, however, carve a Madonna and Child from a granite rock. It now sits outside my brother’s bookstore, the Toadstool, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a symbol of serenity and love – something missing in today’s fractured world.