The War on Wokeness

“Being awake is Thoreau’s concern from beginning to end in Walden. Like many Americans today, Thoreau reports at the outset of Walden that he is disoriented by the degree to which his fellow citizens are crazed, uncommunicating fanatics. Thoreau intends a sonic jolt for his neighbors: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.””

Yes, we all need to awaken to the many environmental problems we have created for ourselves, problems that Thoreau could hardly have imagined and would have been appalled upon discovering how blindly we collectively “sleepwalked” into them.

But I find the title and thrust of this essay to be somewhat disingenuous, since the kind of “wokeness” many people are up in arms about is NOT what Thoreau was talking about. It seems rather to be a kind of groupthink among certain academics who take delight in another phenomenon of our human social psychology, the scapegoating of people who for one reason or another lie outside their charmed circle of moral acceptability, membership in which seems to require the sharing of a certain set of beliefs and imposing them on others.

But I clicked on this link to hear from those who would articulate these dearly held beliefs and defend them, and from others who are prepared to wage a “war” against them. Any takers, on either side of the issue?

The second paragraph of the piece makes clear the multivalences of “woke” at work, and the word’s meanings used by the figures mentioned in the essay are complementary rather than contradictory.

The editors of the Blog were careful not to provide any metatagging that would indicate the piece had to do with Thoreau as environmentalist. Environmentalism in its usual meaning is not part of the essay, and it’s possible readers who encountered long ago Cavell’s “Senses of Walden,” the starting place for the piece, could be easily excused for looking past the fact that Cavell too takes up Thoreau as a philosopher, an “American” philosopher, and not primarily Thoreau as an environmentalist.

Thoreau frets about his neighbors’ nationalism and patriotism, which are key characteristics — certainly not the only ones — of the contemporary “war on wokeness” as described by the opponents themselves, such as Lawrence Fox and some British Tories, as well as Spencer Klavan here in the U.S. The title of the podcast in which Klavan is interviewed is: “The Philosophy of Wokeness.” A link to the podcast is in the piece, mainly to emphasize continually the linkage between “wokeness” and philosophy, since this is all happening inside the APA Blog.

Those at war with “wokeness,” like Klavan, can be found easily online. Some of the reasons Klavan is upset are matters addressed by Thoreau, who urges his (Thoreau’s) readers, for example, not to get caught up in nostalgia, in valorizing the past. Cavell reads Thoreau as a philosopher urging others to let go of the past.

Perhaps you’d be willing to provide a sample of what you think are those “dearly held beliefs” you mention at the end of your comment?

We agree on the scale of the environmental problems facing human beings, but not on their pre-eminence. In the post, one design feature was to show that our attention might best be directed to global capitalism, the cause of many of those astounding environmental problems you reference. As Žižek has pointed out, the problems generated by global capitalism will not be solved by individuals, even individuals who make ecologically informed choices (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-zizek). Someone in the grocery store fretting about which farm-raised salmon is most sustainable isn’t going to save the oceans. It’s going to require worldwide, collective action, and a political outlook that isn’t rooted to one nation, one ethnic group. It will require solidarity. (My hope is that you don’t associate solidarity with “groupthink,” and that you would acknowledge that irrationality can be a characteristic of individuals as well as groups, e.g., Ruth Padel’s, “Whom Gods Destroy : Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness”). The capitalists are aware that the many people worry about the environment, so companies provide the psychological balm (a.k.a., ideology) to keep capitalism functioning. Žižek on Starbucks: “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, etc.”

The phrase “war on wokeness” is not my doing. The phrase has been in the media for at least a few months (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/09/woke-wars-united-states-britain/), with some observers pinpointing its origin amongst Tories in Britain (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/01/23/roads-named-victoria-cross-heroes-latest-tory-plan-war-woke/). That last URL comes from a link in the piece for the APA Blog. To their credit, the Blog’s editors are insistent that contributors provide sources for claims, but that also means extra reading for the audience kind enough to take time to read the posts. The two links above would provide you with some of the topics under discussion when the “war on wokeness” comes up, two of which are a complaint that some people display an insufficient level of nationalism and patriotism. Thus, Texas’s politicians endorsing legislation that the national anthem be part of public sporting events. In a related action, the Governor of Texas signed this week a bill from the legislature that prohibits conversations about racial matters in public education.

Thoreau is an adversary of those devoted to nationalism and patriotism, as Stanley Cavell documents. Cavell is also aware of a powerful push in “American” philosophy to promote individualism, such as his comment in “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending” about Emerson’s “incessant promotion of the individual over the social.”

Dear Professor Krajewski, thank you for responding in a straightforward manner and providing some links to fill in the political context of “the war on wokeness.” I have some comments on “global capitalism,” but first my take on our human group behavior, and what I see as the dangers of the increasing polarization between certain subgroupings within our human species.

“The individual is a group animal—at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness’” (Wilfred Bion, 1961, Experiences in Groups). Such is the prefacing quote in C. Fred Alford’s Group Psychology & Political Theory; Alford’s interests target, however, not the large abstract groups with whom identification is taken to constitute “identity” by some, but rather the small, face-to-face groups formed transiently to undertake the task of studying their own group processes—the dynamics of which may throw some light on the kinds of human interactions that give rise to what’s going on in this “war on wokeness.” I spoke earlier about the importance of engaging in individual thinking as opposed to being swept up in the “groupthink,” and I’m interested in trying to see us on several levels—as members of a single species sharing much commonality, as individual thinkers and doers, capable of making moral decisions about our own actions, and as members of different sorts of groupings, some by choice, some by accident of birth, some by circumstances created by a little of both—with our inclusion in these different groupings often playing a highly influential role in what we actually come to think and do. As Eviatar Zerubavel points out, “it is society”—or at least the subgroup of our society with which we are affiliated—“that determines what we come to regard as ‘reasonable’ or ‘nonsensical,’ and it usually does so by exerting tacit pressure which we rarely even notice unless we try to resist it” (1997, Social Mindscapes, 13). He also speaks of the socially-induced process of “learning to ignore” certain things while attending to others in the ways that the social groups around us do, and notes that we often become enmeshed in “conspiracies of silence”—“refusing to acknowledge the presence of things that actually beg for attention” (2006, The Elephant in the Room). When I look into the kinds of narratives I see spinning in the media put out on both “sides” of the issues that seem to be at the center of “wokeness,” I try to ask, what are the ideas that are being promoted, and which topics are being suppressed? On the right, discussion about the actual history of slavery in the US doesn’t get much air play—these narratives are being suppressed—while yes, “patriotism” does seem to come out a big winner. That side counters, however, with scenes of property destruction and threats (if not acts) of physical violence on the part of some apparent proponents of “wokeness”—maintaining that these topics seem to be taboo on the MSN channels—and ask if “defunding the police” is really a good idea.

I’m not currently living inside the US, so I watch what’s going on with a mixture of curiosity and concern—I worry that the circulating messages within both of these social/political groupings are contributing to increasing polarization that sets them on a collision course. By “groupthink” I mean the phenomenon by which members of certain groupings become caught up in a feed-forward process of continually reinforcing one another’s beliefs and attitudes regarding something while actively excluding or denying conflicting information, generally with an overall trajectory serving to drive the larger social grouping to move in a particular direction or take a certain kind of action, often without permitting thoughtful discussion incorporating a diversity of perspectives. Given this definition, there also seems to be a worrisome overlap between what some would call the “political correctness” being promoted on the left and the current drumbeat pushing us toward uncritical acceptance of centrally dictated COVID “lockdowns” and often seemingly arbitrary restrictions, barraging us with thousands of images of “shots in arms” while threatening the unvaccinated with being “locked out” of the ability to take part in the activities of normal life, while messages urging us to slow down and look at the bigger picture are being suppressed—particularly disturbing in light of what seem, to those with access to the scientific literature, to be obvious lies on the part of Drs. Fauci and Collins (check out the acknowledgement of grant funding: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985.pdf). The intense “push” behind all this feels very much like the social pressure in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11/01 event that led to the Patriot Act, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the mandate to take our shoes off whenever we board an airplane—leading some to inquire about the larger agenda behind it all this time. Groupthink coming from anyplace on the political spectrum can be dangerous—particularly in light of the degree to which what we take for “knowledge” is socially constructed—because it puts us increasingly out of touch with concerns of importance that have been designated “unthinkable,” the silence around them enforced by social ostracism and scapegoating of “heretics.” Len Fisher (2009, The Perfect Swarm, 97-104) suggests that the way to counter groupthink is for individuals to “get out of the group environment for a while” and reach conclusions about important topics on their own, and then to engage in collective deliberation with others of different perspectives. Unfortunately, the polarization seems to have gone too far to permit this now.

However, I’m glad we agree on at least the scale of our environmental problems, and I agree that one of the underlying drivers causing and continually escalating these problems is indeed global capitalism. I also agree that it will “require worldwide, collective action” to reconstruct ways of conducting the necessary exchange of life-sustaining goods within a system quite different from that of global capitalism, with its unapologetic oppression, exploitation and ecological destruction. I believe the ultimate cause of this strange phenomenon, global capitalism, is also a product of the “social mindscape,” our now-near-global collective belief in the ontological priority of the socially constructed symbol-game we call economics. While it’s true that most people’s lives now depend upon their good or bad fortune within that game, it’s still a serious mistake for any of us to believe that this system of abstract rules governing what we do with ontologically subjective entities like “money,” “interest rates,” “credit scores” and the like—all of which, after all, only “exist” in people’s heads—is of greater ontological substantiality than the biogeophysical system of the planet, which is what really supports our human lives. The global economic game is driving us to seriously undercut the functioning of that larger system, at the same time that it wreaks terrible damage on all the lives that fall under its regime of oppression, exploitation and destruction.

But it is not only human beings, and human groupings, that experience oppression, exploitation and destruction, and it’s not only the regime of global capitalism that produces these effects (although it is a major contributor). There are a great many other forms of life, and many of them are sentient, highly intelligent, not only clearly conscious but mentally and emotionally very much like unto ourselves—however one might choose to describe these nonhuman lives, it cannot be denied that they are filled with subjective experience. Very often the organization of capitalist production systems results in the exploitation of both groupings of humans and groupings of nonhumans—the conditions of industrialized slaughterhouses stand as one example of this, while our relentless, continuing takeover of land and the commodification of the body parts and “bushmeat” of the Earth’s remaining wildlife (which we humans plus our livestock now, according to one calculation, outweigh by about 50:1) parallels the shameful marginalization and destruction of indigenous human beings around the world. So far the intersectionality of the oppression and exploitation of all these lives is so far only addressed by a handful of ecofeminists and other environmental philosophers, but I can only hope that, as more and more of us begin to “wake up” to the even bigger picture, we will start to see anthropocentrism as being as much of an evil as racism—and even more destructive, since it not only harms the immediate sufferers of exploitation, its insidious pervasiveness lets us allow global capitalism to run rampant, destabilizing planetary systems and endangering all life in a way that an ethical respect for nonhuman life would have prohibited long ago.

My own personal war on woke culture consists of the claim that an excessive focus on consciousness raising is distracting us from specific, bold, plans of action.

Imagine that your kitchen catches on fire. What is the rational response? Attend a seminar on the history of kitchen fires? Write a book about fundamental problems inherent in current building codes? Give a lecture that will “wake” everyone on the danger of untended stoves?

Or would the rational act be to take immediate specific bold action for putting the fire out?

Woke culture desperately pretends to be desperately serious, but without specific bold plans it is well intended, but delusional.

A war on woke culture can be launched both from the right, and from the left.