Does ‘woke’ have a future?

Wokery: A Wake-Up Call for the West   Edited by David Daintree | Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, 2024, 152 pages

This work is a publication of the Christopher Dawson Press in Hobart, edited by the classicist David Daintree. It goes to prove that not everything from the “Apple Isle” of Australia is on the far left of the political spectrum.

Christopher Dawson was possibly the greatest Catholic historian of the 20th century, since one of his gifts was to connect social developments with underlying theological principles. In a similar manner many of the essays in this collection analyse contemporary social pathologies with reference to the philosophical principles underpinning them.

The book opens with an introduction from David Daintree. He suggests that the Left of today is very different from the Left of 60 years ago. The latter, he suggests, at least believed in freedom of speech. Maybe 60 years ago they did, but not 40 years ago when I was an undergraduate. I have very clear memories of microphones suddenly not working when a Liberal Club member tried to give a speech and polite conservative students being dismissed from the podium because some Marxist chairperson was offended by their “bourgeois” manners. I found myself strongly concurring with Deidre Clary and Fiona Mueller whose essay is the first substantive piece in the collection. They argued that the Australian national curriculum needs to be reinforced in the area of critical thinking and communication skills, especially debating skills. David Daintree would also, no doubt, strongly agree with this conclusion.

Following Clary and Mueller, Kenneth Crowther proposes that “incoherence forms the foundation of the woke movement”. The poorly educated, he notes, do not really care about incoherence. It doesn’t bother them. They think it is perfectly okay to be irrational. Those who care about rationality are by definition “logocentric” and this is bad – logocentrism is for woke types an analogue for a mortal sin. The woke intellectual as described by Crowther has no loyalty, and thus can never enjoy real community, and only trusts his or her own feelings.

As an example of the incoherence factor, Crowther offers the following sketch of the typical woke intellectual:

“As a politician in one chamber he will cry we must save the environment for future generations, and in another he’ll legislate the destruction of those generations before they’re born. As a female CEO she’ll praise the advantages of a boardroom with more women than men, and then as an enlightened progressive she’ll suggest that women basically are men. As a firm supporter of women’s professional sporting teams, he’ll fight for those teams to be filled with biological males. As a state party leader, he’ll advocate for women’s rights while ejecting women from his party who advocate for women’s existence.”

Crowther concludes that “what is required is a return to reality: a full return to logocentrism”.

Kevin Donnelly then addresses the typical woke attitude that those who care about the past and wish to conserve something of the social treasure of the past are simply boring, stagnant types, who have no interest in improving anything but wish to remain trapped in some pre-modern period. With reference to the ideas of scholars such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and Augusto del Noce, Donnelly makes the point that respect for the past does not imply standing still. He notes that it is ironic, or Crowther would say, “incoherent”, that “while the indigenous welcome to country asks everyone to acknowledge and value ‘traditional custodians’ and ‘elders past and present’, the same respect is not given to the heritage and elders associated with Western civilisation”.

Returning to the attack on logocentrism theme, Sarah Flynn-O’Dea notes that an element of wokery is shifting how we perceive reality from an accurate perception of reality “as it is” to a reality that is determined by human will. One merely needs to will something to be true for it to be so. If I want to be a cat, I can be a cat. It does not matter that I was not born with four paws, feline genetics, whiskers and a tail. Flynn-O’Dea quotes James Lindsay’s observation that the “negation of the real is established by creating an interpretative frame that deliberately causes people to misunderstand reality – disconnecting one from reality through its images and constructs”. Flynn-O’Dea then notes that the real is “replaced with a ‘hyperreal simulation’, the invisible cloth (gender fluidity, antiracism, equity, diversity and inclusion), a Utopian promise that never actualises”. She concludes that the best foil to this flight from reality is a classical education.

Karina Hepner’s essay added the expression “Goblin mode” to my vocabulary. Not only does the attack on logocentrism lead to idiocy (for example, human beings pretending to be cats) it also discourages any attempt to improve oneself. Hepner notes that according to a World Economic Forum study in 2022, one of the five most searched words was “Goblin Mode”. It means “unleashing the creature within and shamelessly embracing your inner slob”. So, if I say I am going into “Goblin mode” I assume this means something like not bothering about matters of personal hygiene and grooming, staying in pyjamas all day, and leaving the dishes on the kitchen bench until one runs out of clean coffee mugs. Hepner does not recommend this. She exhorts her readers to be “the antithesis of the cultural chaos of our time” and to thus emerge from this chaos as “hope personified”. In short, resist the temptation to be a slob!

Daniel Lewkovitz also exhorts his readers to resist the culture of wokery. His essay focuses on the manner in which businesses are imposing woke ideology on their employees. He suggests that “companies will need to learn to tell the difference between genuine complaints from pissed off customers versus hundreds of emails magically generated by a single person who’s never had a real job, sitting at their keyboard using AI software”.

In order for people to find their way back to reality and the truth that underpins it, Archbishop Julian Porteous recommends the path of beauty. Within the Catholic intellectual tradition truth, beauty and goodness are described as the transcendental properties of being. Their relationship is described as perichoretic, meaning in the manner of a circular dance. They are each gateways to the other. As a general point of principle Archbishop Porteous explains that “whether it be the pagan gods of Greece or Rome, or the ‘noble truths’ proposed by Buddhism, or the articulation of Christian virtues inspired by Sacred Scripture, societies have fashioned moral imperatives based on some form of transcendental order. The moral structures have, in their turn, defined the cultures and have been a point of social cohesion”.

Archbishop Porteous follows the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) in suggesting that if people have despaired of truth, then a way to get them back on track, so to speak, is through the contemplation of beauty. As Porteous writes: “beauty opens us to the glory of the Lord”. When we encounter beauty we are “drawn towards the source of beauty” and “taken beyond ourselves”. This in turn “opens us up to the reality of the divine”. This was also the understanding of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, who, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis (2007), wrote: “Like the rest of Christian Revelation, the liturgy is inherently linked to beauty: it is ‘veritatis splendor’. The liturgy is a radiant expression of the paschal mystery in which Christ draws us to himself and calls us to communion”.

John Roskam from the Institute of Public Affairs takes the view that the educational institutions in Australia are now so “unequivocally hostile to freedom” that they cannot be renovated or “recaptured”. The logic of this judgment is that alternative institutions will need to be created. At first they will not carry the same social kudos of the older corrupted institutions but they may well be the little oases of sanity from which a new generation will arise, free from all the ideological baggage that has replaced the quest for truth, goodness and beauty. Roskam’s essay is delightfully rational. He observes: “It’s understandable a church would have a view on abortion. Why a football club should have one is less clear”.

The final essay in the collection is by Emeritus Professor Ramesh Thakur who summarises much of the above with his assessment that “the pursuit of social justice animated by group rights and an expanding victimhood hierarchy and grievance industry has become a war on truth, science, facts, merit and achievement”.

Underlying all the essays in the collection is the belief that rationality is good, that the pursuit of truth is possible, and that intellectual disagreement and debate are possible without resorting to character assassination or other attempts to “cancel” one’s interlocutor.

The collection is highly readable and could be given to students in the higher years of secondary school as well as to undergraduates.

What is the future of “wokery” after the surprising result of the US election?    

AUTHOR

Tracey Rowland

Tracey Rowland is St John Paul II Chair of Theology at University of Notre Dame (Australia)

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