For some, the explosion of so-called “woke” culture in the wake of recent police brutality cases comes as a bit of a surprise. In 2020, it seems that terms like “anti-racist” and “white supremacy” are common parlance, whereas before they were primarily found in the pages of scholarly journals and graduate school classrooms.
There had certainly been ripples in the broader culture, but the death of George Floyd at the hands of former police officer Derek Chauvin reignited calls for social justice with a vengeance we haven’t seen in quite some time. Chants of “Black Lives Matter” can not only be heard virtually everywhere around the US and around the world, the phrase has become commonplace, appearing everywhere from basketball courts to church bulletin boards.
There is a difference, though, between this and previous conversations sparked by police brutality. That is, we are talking about a lot more than police brutality. This is evident in the protests that have moved beyond calls for police reform and toward calling for fundamental changes to how society is structured. The ideology at work is interestingly evident in the push toward dismantling monuments–and not just monuments to confederate leaders but monuments to Abraham Lincoln and even Frederick Douglass.
The current movement is about more than focusing on black lives and black experiences–a critically important project–and more than rejecting uncomfortable or controversial symbols of the past. It is, at least in part, an ideological push underpinned by particular ideas about race, sex, and power that see society and culture in a way that differs radically from traditional philosophy and politics.
This is the so-called “woke” view, based on critical social theory, or simply, “critical theory.” Critical theory is made up of a complex web of inter-disciplinary thinkers, but at a high level, it
constitutes an effort to rethink and reform Marxist social criticism; it characteristically rejects mainstream political and intellectual views, criticizes capitalism, promotes human liberation, and consequently attempts to expose domination and oppression in their many forms.
encyclopedia.com, Cengage
On its surface, critical theory sounds a lot like traditional philosophy, but it’s founded on an inherently different premise: that of what’s called “immanent critique,” which seeks to uncover inherent contradictions in texts and social structures that create those texts.
Critical theory identifies these contradictions in order to expose the power structures that underlie them. Once these structures have been critiqued and dismantled (or, more specifically, their unstable/false foundations revealed), critical theory pushes for radical change to replace them with more ‘equitable’ structures that achieve justice for traditionally marginalized groups.
On its surface, this sounds like a good thing: if the foundations upon which certain structures are founded is indeed false, revealing that falsehood should be righting a wrong, right? Well, as always, things are not so simple. The philosophy upon which a lot of the contemporary critical theory and social justice ideology are founded carries its own ontological and epistemological foundations that could be subject to interrogation. And more than that, these ideas have been pushed to its limit and selectively curated to achieve targeted political aims.
Much of this process and history is laid out with admirable clarity (since so much of this work reads as intentionally obscure and opaque) by James Lindsay, mathematician and founder of New Discourses.
I rarely share such long videos since I think they’re hard to watch, at least in one sitting, but I thought Lindsay did such a good job of breaking down these ideas and how they’ve moved from the halls of academia to the boardroom in his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.
I think it’s important to identify the political/theoretical underpinnings of this so-called “woke” ideology not because I disagree with the need to hear minority voices and ensure all are treated justly (in fact, quite the opposite), but because I think the ideology actually hurts minority populations by tokenizing them and reducing them to their group identity.
Dionysian GENERATOR 