There is no word in the English language more likely to generate heated debates and general bewilderment than “woke”. Those who use the term – as a form of self-identification, a pejorative, or simply as a means to describe a belief-system – tend to do so without consideration of the multiple ways in which it is interpreted.
Only this week, an opinion piece in the Guardian bore the headline “‘Woke’ isn’t dead – it’s entered the mainstream. No wonder the right is furious”. Its author, Gaby Hinsliff, shows no sign of having attempted to understand the various meanings of the term or how it has changed over the years. Even the headline betrays her lack of curiosity. What we call “wokeness” has been promoted by the Conservatives and Labour alike, and so to grapple with this subject in terms of “right” and “left” is to miss the point spectacularly.
In the wake of the Cass Report, Hinsliff understands in some vague way that the lack of evidence of “gender medicine” and the sterilisation of healthy children has come about due to the rise of the “woke” ideology. But she conflates this grotesque medical scandal with the closure of vegan restaurants and the declining popularity of oat milk. This is precisely the kind of semantic confusion that Guardian writers are usually so eager to criticise.
Hinsliff defines woke as “the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice”, but misses an important qualification. To this formulation, it would be accurate to add the words: “by authoritarian means”. For all that the woke movement attracts bullies who can enjoy the mask of virtue, I do not doubt that many of these activists are well-intentioned and genuinely believe that they are fighting for a better world. I too would like to see an end to racism and injustice, but I do not for a moment imagine it is a realistic aim given the imperfectability of human nature, and nor do I suppose that the erosion of free speech and liberal values is the best way to attempt it.
On the contrary, the only successful and provable method of curbing racism and other forms of injustice has been the liberal approach. And this is the very method that the “woke” are so determined to undermine and jettison.
In one sense, Hinsliff is correct. Authoritarianism is becoming more mainstream. The new hate speech law in Scotland, the proposed equivalent in Ireland, the Tory party’s various crackdowns on peaceful protest and the anti-freedom antics of the Canadian government all point to a disturbing trend. All this, of course, has come about because many decent people have been gulled into believing that the woke movement is simply a “broader push for social, racial and environmental justice”.
And given that the stakes could hardly be higher, we do require accessible terminology to describe the fundamental aspects of this ideology that is wreaking so much havoc on the western world. Personally I use “woke” as a descriptive shorthand without pejorative connotations. I do so as a kind of courtesy to all those activists and thinkers who have embraced the term for themselves. Those who claim that the word was invented by the right as a “snarl-word” simply don’t know their own history.
It's not perfect, largely because so few agree on its meaning. In 2021, a survey by the Centre for Policy Studies found that only 37 per cent of respondents understood what “woke” meant. And in a YouGov poll in the same year, 23 per cent of respondents said that they were not “woke’, while 12 per cent said that they were. Of the 59 per cent who claimed to understand what it meant to be “woke”, only a third referred to themselves as such, with more than half rejecting the label.
But how else are we meant to encapsulate this sprawling and complex ideology? It is the new state religion, the creed of the establishment, but without accurately describing it we have no means to hold it to account.
I suppose we have two options. Here’s one way that we might describe this dominant worldview:
“An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is wholly constructed through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society, with an intersectional focus that rejects the traditional Marxist prioritisation of class and economic disparities in favour of a conceptualisation of group identity as the prism through which all analysis must be filtered, with a particular emphasis on a form of standpoint epistemology that asserts there are multiple ‘ways of knowing’ and that the ‘lived experience’ of the marginalised must take precedence over empirical or scientific methodology – which are merely tools of the oppressor class – all of which is predicated upon the Foucauldian notion that society operates on the basis of invisible power structures, and that denials of such structures are evidence of their existence (as anyone who would deny them is likely to be benefiting from the privileges they afford) and that therefore there must be a cultural revolution in order to guarantee equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, one that will ultimately achieve the wholesale obliteration of ‘whiteness’, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘cis-heteronormativity’, in which the parameters of thought and speech are limited to the propagation of the cause, and in which all activities of all branches of the media, the arts and the state must be directed towards that end.”
Or we could just say “woke”.
Haha yes Andrew, brilliant as always. I think the most egregious fallacy of the way "woke" is usually portrayed is that it is a "left" or "progressive" or even "Marxist" in nature. Far from it. Marx, Lenin and co were thoroughly objectivist and would not for a moment have endorsed the pink-haired trans activist brigade. At the heart of the "woke" mentality is a world-view that is highly individualistic, reflecting a subjectivist (=the way I see the world is true) and idealist (=not rooted in objective reality) state of mind. And at its heart is a puzzling contradiction: the "woke warrior" argues that everything is subjective - you have your truth, and I have mine, and ne'er the twain shall meet - while at the same time demanding that everyone else subscribes to their mindset, adopting the words, rules and behaviours that they dictate.
Spot on and thanks for the brilliant ending, spelling out what woke is.
Last week the new transgender bill - which included self-ID - was voted off the table by Dutch parliament. Proponents of this bill kept saying that examples of abuse of self-ID in other countries were just anecdotal. Somehow they can never explain the difference between 'anecdotal' and 'lived experience' which in my view is a form of an anecdote.
Is it a lack of critical thinking on their behalf or are people just being disingenuous?