The trouble with labels

Ideological words mean what you want them to mean, minus the obvious bad bits

I’m sick of this shit

This article is conjectural. In short, there's often confusion about what Wokeism is, which leads many people to embrace an anti-liberal ideology in preference to acknowledging any valid qualities to, say, social conservatism. Meanwhile, others attack compassionate sentiments in general as ‘Woke’ because they imagine that it’s cool to be cruel. A pox on both their houses.

---

A large proportion of my reading on the culture wars comes from US thinkers and writers outside of legacy media. At the same time I've reduced my consumption of British mainstream media by maybe 95%. And I'm beginning a third year of Twitter-free information consumption.

I now realise that this has led to a gap between me and some people in my orbit which manifests as talking past each other. It's because we are influenced by people who mediate information in particular ways. As an intuitive leftist it feels weird to know that my antipathy to Wokeism comes across as a right-coded view, but I can see how that arises.

The reason I disavow Wokeism as a solution to inequality in life quality and outcomes for different groups is because it breaches certain left wing and liberal intuitions that remain baked in for me, despite relinquishing all 'structured' ideologies as guaranteed to be riddled with inconsistencies and unintended consequences.

My suspicion is that British friends in particular - who typically share my left wing and liberal intuitions - are confused about the 'Woke' word for two reasons.

One is that conservatives have weaponised it as a slur, which triggers the instinct to appropriate it with pride. As black people did with the N-word, or gay people with 'queer'.

The other reason is that it is being laundered into their world by a legacy media (and social media bubbles) that generally ignore the obviously counter-rational and toxic aspects.

A conversation this weekend with someone close to me confirmed that our ideas of what it means to be Woke differed significantly. She said it was "to be alive to the injustices suffered by some racial groups and others". I said that to be Woke means you aren't only conscious of unfair disparities but support the idea of creating fresh disparities to make amends.

Her understanding is confirmed by the British pollster YouGov, which offers a rundown of what Woke means to Britons.

It's helpful to notice this when you are puzzled that each other think what you do, without realising that you're each predicating your views on different base assumptions.

This isn't just happening in my personal orbit. In the wider culture there seems to be a deep questioning of liberalism in general as a framework for order and norms for inter-group relating which seems to be sparked by the remarkable progress of Wokeism as a moral arbiter of everything.

Here's where and how I think these differences emerge.

One is really simple. It's that you're going to hate whatever the 'other side' thinks. So, if idiots in the comments section of the Daily Mail bang on about something being Woke you're going to reflexively aver that being Woke is superior. There's nothing as effective at making me feel quite Woke myself as reading the comments on Bari Weiss's Substack, Unherd and Quillette.

An example of this kind of polarising flattening is this tweet from a British comedian called Kathy Burke.

I love being 'woke'. It's much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat

I get why it's funny. But it's only funny if you ignore the manifestations of Wokeness that are self-evidently oppressive.

Regular readers will know something already of Mimetic theory and my pet thoughts on how we tend to emulate those with high social capital who share our ideological intuitions. There's a lot of that sentiment underlying tweets like Burke's. Who want's to be an ignorant fucking twat when one can simply be nice, like her?

American readers are much more familiar with the oddnesses, hypocrisies, internal inconsistencies and posturing that seem to underpin left-coded social positions when they are gelled into an ideology called Woke. My sense is that British people are largely unaware of these contradictions and their apparent unintended consequences.

So Wokeism has crossed the pond and now it just means being nice, for many people.

This puts critics of Wokeism as an ideology onto the back foot, especially those (like muggins here) on the left who see the genuinely egregious continuing exploitation and exclusion in the economy and society as class-based and not rooted in whether people have more or less melanin, worship different deities or have a subjective idea of their gender as separate from their biological sex.

The long march through the institutions isn't over until we have all learned to be nice and the leftish have prevailed over the left.

Ultimately the problem is one of ideology rather than ideas. You can have an idea such as unionising the gig economy workforce is desirable to prevent some employers from taking the piss and also have a view that importing cheap migrant labour is also taking the piss, but because they don't both fit under the banner of Wokeism it makes you an ignorant fucking twat. Ideology requires simplicity like that.

The trouble with embracing Woke as a label is that it's an ideology you may not realise you're falling into. From there it's a simple step to further polarisation, even between people with almost identical instincts.

Sometimes, in my most feverish conspiratorial imaginings, I wonder if Wokeism isn't really a genius move by hidden hands on the right to replace socialism as an aspiration. But in the end I go with simple mimetic groupishness and the emergence of Luxury Beliefs.

Just as fervent right wingers seem to combine otherwise disparate beliefs such as Covid vaccines are a crime against humanity, climate change has always happened so stop worrying about it along with charity begins at home and I should be able to keep more of the money I worked for, the leftish adopts its own unconnected principles in clusters. Workers need protection from exploitative bosses and you're a bigot if you think that it should take more than declaring yourself to be a woman for you to serve a sentence for rape in a women's prison.

This is one of the reasons I became wary of ideology as opposed to ideas, aims and principles. The other is that ideology necessitates the end of reasoned thinking when confronted with a contra perspective.

Ideology is what makes you know for certain that people who disagree with you must be in the wrong. (Benjamin Herborth)

It saves you the effort of talking.

Wokeism is an ideology and the many accounts of it as an emergent religion (for a post-God world) are often compelling.

But as a label one might prefer to another (wouldn't you rather be woke than an ignorant fucking twat) it seems far more reasonable.

But it isn't liberal, as the ever-growing list of wrongthink victims attests. Defining the non-Woke as ignorant fucking twats is also - amusingly - a form of hate speech permitted for purposes of promoting niceness. I was the same, at one time. I thought nothing of smearing Brexit voters as 'thick bigots'.

It's probably best to stop using the W word altogether. Given that we all have different notions of what being Woke actually means there is little useful information to be gleaned by talking about it. It's hard, but I intend to try.

One of my favourite thinkers in this field, Thomas Prosser, provides many more arguments against adopting ideologies in general in this article - Why ideologies harm individuals.

Perhaps what I'm driving at in my objection to reducing the word 'Woke' to a bland notion of niceness is the concept he mentions called 'decontestation'. Read his piece - it will make sense.

In a way, adopting an ideology (even unconsciously) is actually a great cognitive labour saver because it exempts you from troubling to understand other perspectives. Wrapping one's views of an irreducibly complex world into a simple moral framework that categorises anyone who thinks differently as bad or stupid means there's little point in bothering to engage in any meaningful way. Why would you bother? They're bad or stupid, right?

I also saw this failure in some of the leftish piss-taking on the socials of many ordinary people's sorrow over the death of their queen. In particular a parody piece that sneeringly sought to argue that the stupid anti-Woke people were mourning 'performatively' when they constantly complain about performative grievance and angst posting. The money shot was 'there is no woke in a wake' (har har, nailed it, went all the midwits in the replies) and all I could think was how the writer had expended no cerebral energy to understand why the queen might have mattered to anyone, let alone the gulf between loving your country and its traditions and being an empire-obsessed blood and soil nationalist.

It seemed Jungian, in fact. You see the worst in others because their faults highlight the worst in yourself.

But this is what happens when we snack on viral snippets and 'takes'. We are reduced to drones perpetuating a flattened perspective, revelling in our superiority by sneering at that which we don't even want to grasp. It's fun. Until you notice that, really, it's a miserable way to be. It's how I was, in my Twitter days. Fully conversant with ignoring the detail in pursuit of the sneering put-down and consequently frustrated as fuck all the time when the 'other side' didn't realise my side had 'eviscerated' them.

A final thought is that if you spend your increasingly finite time trying to 'own' people who see things differently than you, you have actually become their bitch. Think about it.

---