Hard as it may be in the echo chambers of the left and the right to understand, ‘wokeness’ is only a thing in the Anglo-American world. It has made negligible impact elsewhere so far (yes, it’s making inroads into Europe but not as much as Americans might think). Even in France, the country that gave birth to the very ideas upon which the foundations of the ideology of wokedom rests (the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze that traveled to the Californian campuses since the 1970s), ‘wokedom’ hasn’t taken root. Indeed even France’s leftist intellectuals (many of them direct disciples of Foucault and Derrida) are horrified at how mangled and misunderstood their masters’ ideas have permeated into the rot of American intellectual discourse that’s now being drip fed into the cultural mainstream.
I sometimes wish I could take some of these white and black SJWs and show them the world (I’m pretty sure most don’t travel or ever engaged with other cultures or even learn another language). To show them how the world they inhabit is so shallow and inconsequential.
Go to Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, or the Far East, and many just have no idea what ‘being woke’ is. More importantly, they do not care. Their struggles and challenges are a world away from the skin deep victimhood fueled tantrums of the spoiled Anglo-American millennial middle classes.
Those that do know (the ones who travel to the West) are shocked. My Japanese friend from school days in Europe look at ‘Cancel culture’ and how it is used to destroy people, publicly humiliate them just like intellectuals were during the Cultural Revolution in China. There is no grace, no forgiveness, just sadistic pleasure in personal annihilation. They worry that the West - whom they respect and admire is on a self-inflicted path to catastrophic destruction.
Some say that ‘wokeness’ is the new religion of the aimless white middle class millenials and ‘social justice’ is its new god. I can see the analogy except in one crucial and important aspect. Unlike Christianity which grew from the ground up through the truly marginalized - women and slaves - to change the world, wokeness has always been a top down movement, just like all the ill-fated and blood soaked ‘isms’ of the past (jacobinism, socialism, and communism).
False gods will always fall.
Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with political activism per se, it is a mark of an engaged citizen and a good neighbor to stand up for things that are unfair and unjust. But when political activism is based on destructive emotions, we all lose.
I certainly don’t hate leftist woketards because hate is such an unhelpful emotion. However, when your whole identity is based on emotional reasoning rather than a rational or empirical one then that is hard going. Nor do I blame the woke left. That would be too easy. They are just weak jealous fools. For the most part, I blame the rest of us because we as a collective have become intimidated, loosening our grip and relinquished rightful claims to our inherited history, cultural traditions, and unique national heritages.
No comments:
Post a Comment