Keith Parsons: The Defection of the Woke

Guest essay on Wednesday, 10 April 2024

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again and again: My respect for Keith Parsons has always been high but keeps getting stronger. When he submits a fresh guest essay, it is always, like this one, a thought-provoking delight. Diane and I are delighted that he’s enlightening and educating you (and us), even as we marvel that he’s being published in Letters… instead of in a major national journal of philosophy or opinion.

I can’t wait to read Part Two.

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THE DEFECTION OF THE WOKE

PART I

Like so many people my age, I became politically aware in the sixties. It was a remarkable decade by any measure. A lot happened, both good and bad. It was a decade that genuinely lived up to the Dickensian, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” One of the remarkable things about the decade is that the political left mattered. They didn’t achieve their biggest goals, but they had a voice and they were heard. Their message was focused: End the war in Vietnam. Resist the draft. Work for peace and oppose the military/industrial complex. They didn’t win. They got rid of Lyndon Johnson, but they got Richard Nixon instead. The war dragged on and Nixon even expanded it into Cambodia. Yet the left was America’s conscience, speaking the truths that had to be said. They said that Vietnam was a bloody shambles, utterly futile and atrocious. By mid-decade even Robert McNamara, the chief architect of the Vietnam War, (privately) recognized that they were right. 58,000 Americans died and three million Vietnamese.

Where is the left today? Are they united in opposing the flood tide of fascism with might and main? Are they leading the fight against Trump? Are they America’s conscience? Some are fighting the good fight, like the rather old-fashioned left/liberal warriors such as Rachel Maddow and David Corn, However, the new wave left, normally referred to as the “woke” left, seems strangely hors de combat.

Why?  Too many distractions. The Woke are focused on DEI, “identity,” and implementing “antiracism” programs. Their intellectual obsessions are the arcane minutiae of “Theory”: Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory. They are absorbed by transgender issues and making sure that the right pronouns are used. They want disabled and fat people to feel good about themselves. Whatever the importance or relevance of these concerns, they shrink to insignificance in the glare of the headlight of the oncoming freight train of fascism. If Donald Trump is elected in 2024, none of this will matter.

Three recent books offer an analysis of the malaise of the left. They are Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race Gender and Identity, and Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Left is not Woke by Susan Neiman, and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk. Pluckrose is a writer, speaker, and editor who describes herself as “an exile from the humanities.” Lindsay is a mathematician and physicist who is the author of several books and numerous widely published essays. Neiman is a professional philosopher and author of numerous books who lives in Berlin and is the director of the Einstein Forum. Mounk is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, a prolific author, and a senior fellow at The Council on Foreign Relations. I will review these books and offer my own comments and analyses of the issues they raise. In this post I will begin with Cynical Theories because it examines the intellectual obsessions that preoccupy today’s left, shaping its messages and agendas. I will offer a review of the other two books in a later post.

To understand who the Woke are, you have to know their intellectual history, the genealogy of ideas that began in the rarified realms of thought and developed into today’s activism. Pluckrose and Lindsay take on the prodigious task.  They do so by examining and critiquing the vast field of what they call “Theory,” that is, theories such as postcolonialism, queer theory, gender studies, critical race theory, intersectionality, disability and fat studies, and social justice theory in general. They classify all of these under the heading “Theory” because, they argue, all are outgrowths of the postmodernist theory that flourished in academe during the latter decades of the twentieth century, and all share common themes and assumptions inherited from that source. The social justice activism of today’s Woke is the application of such Theory.

What is postmodernism? “Postmodernism” is difficult to define for three reasons. First, postmodernism was more than a set of propositions, it was a broad movement in the humanities and the arts, and it is difficult to devise a definition that would, for instance, encompass its realization in philosophy and in architecture. Second, the postmodernists resisted definition because they saw all efforts to specify precise categories as misleading and sought to undermine all canonical descriptions. Third, postmodernism produced considerable hostility among those who viewed it as a sort of nihilistic relativism that abolished rationality and meaning. Proffered definitions might therefore be tendentious.

Simon Blackburn’s definition of “postmodernism” in his Dictionary of Philosophy (second edition) begins as follows:

In the culture generally, postmodernism is associated with a playful acceptance of surfaces and superficial style, self-conscious quotation, and parody...and a celebration of the ironic, the transient, and the glitzy. It is usually seen as a reaction against a naive and earnest confidence in progress, and against confidence in objective or scientific truth (285).

He also sees postmodernism as appropriating aspects of Nietzsche’s perspectivism:

Objectivity is revealed as a disguise for power or authority in the academy, and often as the last fortress of white male privilege. Logical or rational thought is revealed as the imposition of suspect dichotomies on the flux of events (285).

In The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth notes two key assumptions of postmodernism:

Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, that there is no common denominator—in “nature” or “truth” or “God or “the future”—that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems—of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value (828).

As I understand these definitions, they imply that postmodernism assumes an extreme form of antirealism. As Richard Rorty put it, “… there is no language-independent reality, no single ‘Way that the World Is….’” If two claims conflict, there is no fact of the matter, no way that things are, that can make one answer right and the other wrong. The relative position of the cat and the mat have no bearing on the truth or falsity of “the cat is on the mat.” Indeed, it is an error to think that there are cats and mats “out there” independently of what socially situated speakers say about cats and mats. Further, all “human systems,” which I take to include all human cognitive endeavors, are “self-reflexive.” That is, science is about science, not the natural world. History is about history (the discipline) and not about history (the actual sequence of events). Finally, logic is a tool of oppression and any claim to objective knowledge is an imposition of power and privilege.

To someone deeply imbued with scientific/rationalist/realist assumptions (like the present author), postmodernists may sound like a bunch of zanies or maybe, like the Dadaists of an earlier generation, flippant performance artists intent on mocking whatever they regard as pompous or pretentious. However, the iconic thinker of postmodernism, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), is anything but a merry prankster. He is a serious thinker and must be taken seriously. His most distinctive idea focused on the relation of knowledge and power. Francis Bacon said that knowledge is power, by which he meant that we gain power over the physical world when we acquire objective knowledge of it. For instance, understanding the causes of disease gives us greater power to control or cure it.

Foucault’s analysis is fundamentally different. In his view, all knowledge claims are power relations. For instance, when medicine redefined madness as illness, it brought madness under its aegis and invented a medical specialty—psychiatry—to have authority over it. In general, to claim authoritative knowledge of something is to assert control over it. The film The Madness of King George showed how the authority of the specialist came to supersede even the authority of the king. In general, the establishment of a claim of objective knowledge is also the establishment of a power relation in which the expert has dominance over any would-be rival, reducing that rival to a crank, crackpot, or pseudoscientist. It follows that the essential point about rival knowledge claims is not which one is more accurate, but which one embodies a dominant position over the other.

Foucault himself displayed no activist zeal. The revolution he was interested in was an intellectual revolution. However, it is easy to see how his analysis of knowledge and power could be appropriated and applied in the name of social or reparative justice. The European colonizer thrusting into “darkest Africa” will scorn the natives’ animistic beliefs as “mumbo jumbo” and assert the authority of his beliefs, e.g., Christianity, science, and white superiority. Thus, part of the power wielded by the colonizer is epistemic power, the delegitimization of indigenous beliefs and the establishment of the colonizer’s as “objective.” Postmodernist analysis can be employed to deconstruct the hegemonic claims of the colonizers and elevate the beliefs of the natives.

As Pluckrose and Lindsay note (45) the initial thrust of postmodernism was negative and destructive. All the old iconic assumptions of modernity had to be uprooted, such as the belief in progress and the possibility of objective knowledge. This included an attack on the claims of natural science to offer disinterested and strongly confirmed accounts of the natural world. The attack on science issued in the “science wars” of the nineties, the acrimonious conflict that erupted when scientists and their allies struck back against the postmodernists and their fellow travelers among the sociologists of knowledge, social constructivists, and radical feminists. (See the delightfully pugnacious Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.)

Yet consistent negativity leads only to nihilistic despair, and an activist program was needed. Hence the rise of what Pluckrose and Lindsay call “applied postmodernism (46).” This is scholarship with explicitly activist aims that draws upon themes of postmodernism and applies them to specific problems of social justice. What unites the various branches of Theory—postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, etc.—is that each draws upon distinctive theses identified with postmodernist theory. Pluckrose and Lindsay identify six such theses:

1)    The Blurring of Boundaries

Any categorizations or classifications taken as authoritative are to be undermined. The standard distinctions between subjective and objective, science and nonscience, man and woman, and even health and sickness are discarded as arbitrary and oppressive.

2)    The Power of Language

Language is virtually omnipotent. Entities, structures, and relations previously thought to have substantial, non-linguistic subsistence are actually constructs of language, and so are “real” only with respect to certain speakers in particular social/cultural loci. It follows that reality is not states of affairs to which language must conform but is itself an artifact created by discourse.

3)    Cultural Relativism

Truth is not a correspondence with reality but a creation of the categories and concepts of culturally situated groups. It follows that no culture is in any absolute sense superior to any other. However, some positions wield more power than others and therefore can impose their “truth” on others. Criticism of the less powerful by the more powerful should simply be dismissed.

4)    The Loss of the Individual and the Universal.

There are no universals such as “male,” “female,” “healthy,” or “diseased,” since biology and medicine are just culturally loaded discourses that impose spurious dichotomies, nor are there ethical universals such as equal rights for all. Also, however, individuality is lost. The individual is dissolved into a multiplicity of intersecting culturally and linguistically constructed identities. The basic social unit is not the individual human being—which does not exist—but various local groups defined in terms of such constructs as race, class, sex, sexual orientation, etc.

Perhaps the best way to understand Theory is to contrast it with standard liberalism. According to liberalism, all humans have intrinsic worth and dignity and enjoy certain basic rights just by virtue of their humanity. Historically, however, some groups have been stigmatized and marginalized and not permitted to exercise their rights or have equal access to positions of prestige or power. For instance, “untouchables” in India, Uyghurs in China, African Americans in the United States, and women about everywhere, have historically been relegated to positions of lower status and limited opportunity and have often been subject to exploitation and violent oppression.

Discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, caste, class, religion, sexual orientation, and other such classifications has been a disgraceful fact of history. The liberal solution is to effect broad societal changes that empower and include those historically powerless and excluded. These changes involve revisions of law, custom, representation, and attitude. Concomitantly, the over-privileges enjoyed by some must be curtailed. The goal is equality, not absolute equality in every respect, but in essential respects: equality of rights, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and equality of respect and dignity. “Equal rights for all; special privileges for none” is the liberal’s slogan.

Theory rejects liberalism wholesale and considers it just another form of oppression. Oppression itself is reconceived. It is not so much overt circumstances such as Jim Crow laws or the “morality police” that attack and harass women in conservative Muslim countries. Because of their emphasis on the near-omnipotence of language, Theorists see oppression as pervasively encoded in language. They do not mean just the invidious stereotypes built into language. When I was young, to haggle over a price was to “Jew them down,” to "gyp” (from Gypsy) was to cheat, to give something and then take it back was to be an “Indian giver,” and to not pay off a lost wager when owed was to “Welsh on a bet.” According to Theory, even the most seemingly innocuous discourse can be an oppressive imposition by a dominant group. Theorists remind me of the joke I once heard about two psychoanalysts who pass each other in the hallway. “Good morning!” each says to the other, and then each ponders “I wonder what he really meant by that.”  

The reason the writing of Theorists is often so tortuous and opaque is that even clear expression is suspect. Oppression is redressed by deconstructing language. All of the dichotomies that underlie oppression such as man/woman, gay/straight, able/disabled, and thin/fat are to be comprehensively disrupted and “queered,” where “to queer” is a verb meaning to dispute all categories and dichotomies. As for the liberal’s notion of universal rights possessed by every individual, all such universalist and essentialist notions are rejected. Indeed, as noted above, individuality itself is dissolved. What exists are groups situated on a multi-dimensional grid of power relations. Liberation is achieved by focusing upon and living within one’s own standpoint, speaking from your group’s lived “truth,” and living your group’s life.

Underlying all of this is extreme skepticism about the possibility of objective truth, and this skepticism seems at odds with the resounding self-assurance with which the claims are asserted. Can the nonexistence of objective truth be maintained as an objective truth? Is not the claim of non-objectivity obviously paradoxical, as philosophers back to Plato have realized? In that case, can we not regard those who deny objective truth as merely articulating a personal predilection not to regard any truths as objective? Why, then, should those of us who do not share that predilection take them seriously? Further, how can you argue rationally with those who repudiate rationality as an oppressive construct?

Pluckrose and Lindsay say that the postmodernists were aware of the reflexive or self-referential problems with their claims and were quite explicit that they were not offering their claims as true, but as strategically useful (39). In general, for the proponents of Theory, the relevant question is not whether their version of Theory is true, but whether, as Pluckrose and Lindsay put it, “...it is morally virtuous and politically useful by its own definitions (39).” The key phrase here is “by its own definitions.” If moral and political desiderata can only be defined in terms of one’s own culturally delimited standpoint, then how can they be useful? Useful for what? How can you speak truth to power when power determines truth? If your “good” is not the common good, why would anybody else cooperate with you? The answer would seem to be for the proponents of Theory, the Woke, to get power and then impose their “truth.” The most evident place where the Woke have been able to achieve power is in academe, where they are attempting to turn universities into The Church of Social Justice.

Pluckrose and Lindsay go into considerable detail examining postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, gender studies, and disability and fat studies. One must admire their dedication in plowing through so much material, much of it turgidly written, which they surely found highly antithetical. Their exposition of these theories is fair and is drawn from the best known and foundational proponents such as Judith Butler, Kimberlè Crenshaw, and Edward Said as well as more recent exponents. They trace the broad similarities and subtle differences between these various specialties. I do not have space here to follow through all of these twists and turns, so I will focus on disability and fat studies as typical representatives of Theory. My motivation for focusing on these is personal. I am disabled (hearing-impaired).

According to the proponents of disability and fat studies, these conditions are not medical realities but are socially constructed. Some people are stigmatized as disabled or obese and thereby relegated to an inferior status compared to “normal” people, i.e., those not so characterized. People categorized as fat or disabled are represented as having an undesirable condition that it is their responsibility to address and remediate insofar as possible. Activists seek to undermine the whole conceptual scheme that classifies people according to such categories as able/disabled or thin/fat. “Disabilities” are, in fact, to be accepted and even celebrated; the “disabled” are actually “differently abled.” The autistic should celebrate their difference from the “neurotypical.” Similarly, fat people should celebrate themselves and assert their beauty. For example, the rapper Lizzo strongly affirms body positivity and fat acceptance.

It certainly has to be admitted that the disabled and the obese have often been treated badly. The attitude towards the disabled was long to ignore them, to make them as invisible as possible. It took the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 to begin to ameliorate the situation and mandate accommodations. I often taught classes that made arrangements for the accommodation of the sight or hearing impaired, and I was glad to do so. Fat people tend not to be ignored but despised. Fat kids are bullied and abused. In my experience, P.E. coaches, far from seeking to help, treated fat kids with scorn (I hope things have improved in the sixty years since I had P.E. class!). Obesity is regarded as the outward sign of a character flaw; fat people supposedly are lazy and have no self-control.

Is obesity a social construct? To some extent, it must be. According to the Body Mass Index, a standard measure, exceptionally muscular people, such as a 6’1” 240-pound NFL linebacker, are obese. Further, since weight varies continuously, demarcations between underweight, normal, overweight, and obese have to be to some extent stipulative. However, it would be dishonest and dangerous to fail to recognize that obesity is a serious health problem that contributes significantly to increased morbidity and mortality:

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/basics/consequences.html

Is a disability something to celebrate? In my experience, definitely not. Losing my hearing has been a major hassle and has no upside. Being hearing-impaired is something that has happened to me; it is no part of who I am and does not constitute an identity I would wish to embrace. I can certainly see that the students at Gallaudet University have a strong sense of solidarity, and American Sign Language is a rich and complete natural language. Yet hearing impairment is a real physical condition and must be addressed (hence the need for Gallaudet and accommodation elsewhere) and cannot be dissolved into a social construct by the vaporous musings of Theory. Sight and hearing are natural faculties and to lose them is to lose something important and valuable. To deny this fact is simply mad. (Oops. Foucault showed that madness is a social construct too.)

Pluckrose and Lindsay identify a third phase of the ”postmodernist project,” which they say has developed just since 2010, and which they call “Social Justice scholarship (SJS)” (181). In this latest phase the principles of postmodernism are themselves turned into a metanarrative:

..the belief that society is structured of specific but largely invisible identity-based systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge via the ways of talking about things is now considered by social justice scholars and activists to be an objectively true statement about the organizing principle of society. Does this sound like a metanarrative? That’s because it is. Social Justice scholarship and its educators and activists see these principles and conclusions as The Truth According to Social Justice—and treat it as though they have discovered the analogue of the germ theory of disease but for bigotry and oppression (182).

Let’s see: There is an invisible but omnipresent force pervading the world. This force is omnipotent and can shape and mold reality virtually without limit. Humanity is divided into the elect (the oppressed) and the reprobate (the oppressors). The reprobate are afflicted with total depravity and are inevitably racist and sexist despite their intentions and efforts. A priesthood of activists and scholars is our only access to this omnipresent, omnipotent, but invisible reality, and our only access to salvation through their reconstruction of language. This priesthood preaches these claims as Absolute Truth.

Sound familiar?

And woe unto ye doubters of the Gospel of Social Justice, for cancelling shall be thy lot and thou shalt be cast into the outer darkness where thy tenure shall avail thee not.

Organic evolution is slow, with major changes occurring over geological time. Cultural/intellectual evolution is breathtakingly fast. Over a few years, playful skepticism has ossified into dour dogma. Further, Pluckrose and Lindsay say, as their subtitle indicates, that this dogma harms everyone. Bursting out of its home in the ivory tower, Theory has now moved into your local human resources department.

Business and media personnel have lost their jobs because of infractions that offended woke sensibilities. Entire campuses have been roiled. Pluckrose and Lindsay offer examples, and many more could be adduced. Merely expressing disagreement with any tenet of Theory can get you in trouble because Theorists interpret all questioning of its tenets as evidence of the moral depravity of the questioner. Again, sound familiar?

We now find ourselves situated between dueling fundamentalisms of the left and the right, each making absolute claims and each impervious to contrary evidence or argument. Sublimely free of self-doubt and motivated by righteous zeal, each works tirelessly to extend its power and influence. Of the dueling dogmas, the right-wing one is obviously the more dangerous.

Those cancelled or fired because they supposedly committed sins against sensitivity certainly were harmed. However, the right has political power and money and, as January 6, 2021, showed, they have no scruple about using violence. As I said at the beginning, the most unfortunate thing about the defection of the Woke is that in the fight against fascism we need all hands on deck. Concerns about pronouns or cultural appropriation can wait. Now we have to get out the vote. November 2024 for the United States is like January 1933 for Germany.

Pluckrose and Lindsay conclude by offering their alternative to Theory, but I will save this for a later post that will draw on the other two books, those by Neiman and Mounk.

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