The Original Sins of Wokeness

Well, some of them anyway…

by Corrie Mooney

We talk a lot about what’s wrong with wokeness, and how the ideology formed, but not as much about its foundations.   Where do these bad ideas come from and how did they get to be that wrong to begin with?  What do they mean by ‘denying our existence’ or ‘systemic’ racism?  What leads people to follow these bad ideas.  There is certainly a very large psychological component, but here is a quick window into some of the concepts that feed it.  

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

The Structural Errors

Structuralism is a theory of human culture and meaning.  It is naturally drawn to language and the meaning of words and symbols, but also covers how people act, think and feel, especially between each other.  It holds that all meanings begin and evolve in relationships to other meanings.  Those ideas or meanings are first derived in a context with something else, usually many something elses, and the giant web of meanings that this results in is sometimes called a discourse.   

Structuralism is a helpful model of culture, and has been used widely over the last century, but it is neither exhaustive (it doesn’t explain everything), nor authoritative (it can be wrong in some situations).   Below are three inter-related errors that come out of over-applied structuralism.

Error #1 - Stigmas

Given that most meanings are learned through their interrelation with other meanings, some have assumed that the original context is fixed, or at least is very persistent.    If, when you first ever picked up a rock it was hot from the sun, you will always associate rocks with heat; or you will be tempted to throw it in a lake if that’s what you were taught what to do with them as a child.   Also, given that culture is socially constructed these associations of meaning can be passed on, even from generation to generation.  When these associations are negative, we call them stigmas. This is the basis for the woke’s claim of ‘structural’ or ‘systemic’ oppression. 

This overlooks the fluidity of meaning.    The contexts that surround a word or symbol can and do change, sometimes quite frequently.   Meaning is never fixed, and the discourse is dynamic.  Stigmas can be - and frequently are - overcome.   Conversely, if a word is deliberately changed to avoid stigma, instead the meaning or stigma usually follows the new world.   Think of how many words ‘crippled’ ended up going through (crippled → disabled → handicapped → physically  challenged → accessibility issues → ability).  Or how ‘coloured’, became ‘negro’ then ‘black’ to describe African Americans.  Also, here in Canada, we have had ‘Indian’ changed to ‘First Nations’ to ‘aboriginal’ and now ‘indigenous’.     Of course, many of these never had much stigma to begin with, it’s just a result of how the woke over-emphasise it.  

Which is saying something about how they see the world. 

Error#2 – Seeing What We Say

In 2005, I got my first letter to the editor published in Canada’s National Newspaper, the Globe and Mail.   It was, predictably, about hockey, but particularly about the language used to describe the game at the time.  I saw fit to include a quote by Martin Heidegger, saying “we don’t say what we see, rather, we see what we say about the matter”, from his book History of the Concept of Time.   This is an old structuralist idea – that our language shapes our perceptions more than the other way around.   

The problem is, it really isn’t true.  

If it were, homonyms (or homophones) would be impossible, and people wouldn’t be able to speak different languages.  For example, saying the sentence (out loud) ‘they’re getting their ride there’ would be unintelligible – and it’s not.  Another one: “Raise your right hand if you think the Right believe in the right rights” is a bit of a tongue twister, but that’s all.   The meaning shines through the language even if there is little to no direct context around it.   

Another Example: If the headlines read “Election Results: Big Red Wave” we are going to wonder first – where did this election take place, (and which party uses the colour red)? We are not going to ask why a giant tsunami coloured red stopped the election.  We seek meaning in context first, not make automatic assumptions about literal definitions.  Metaphors are possible because of the primacy of context. 

We say what we see. 

But the woke’s error here isn’t limited to subconscious influence.    

Error#3 – Magic Words

It can be remarkable how often people take a bad idea and rapidly make it much, much worse. The above is no exception.   Not only do some in the woke camp believe that we see what we say literally, they believe what we say makes things real to begin with.  

How did they get to that absurdity?

There is a long tradition in philosophy, from Bishop Berkely, to Johann Fichte to the postmodernists, that hypothesises that reality itself depends on our minds.  To quote Morpheus from The Matrix movie, “If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”   

Unimpeded, this concept leads to the idea of solipsism, that nothing is real outside the mind, that I am just a brain in a vat.   Most people consider this obvious nonsense, but this doesn’t mean people won’t make this case if it suits their ends.

If we combine ‘we see what we say’ and ‘reality is only in my mind’, we get ‘whatever I say is reality’.  Abracadabra.  Magic indeed.   Some call this ‘Radical nominalism’, to most it’s just delusionary.   

If this sounds a stretch too far and that this may be straw-manning, consider the degree to which profilicity is driving identity in today’s social media dominated youth, and culture’s longer turn to performativity-based power.  Is it that hard to believe?   Why are the woke so obsessed with language policing?  Why is a common response from Trans Rights Activists that their very EXISTENCE is threatened when their objective sex is questioned?    This came up recently in a BC court case against Amy Hamm.

🕸goinglikeelsie KPSS! @goinglikeelsie

- statements deny their existence are discriminatory - saying there are only two sexes denies their existence and erases their existence - saying they were deviate and predatory is discriminatory - College had a duty to investigate Amy as she is in a position of trust.

It's the language war’s weapon of mass destruction.    

So, the above three interrelated ‘sins’ are (some) of the structuralist errors of wokeism.   It’s the foundations for their language policing and war on meaning.  They believe that if they change what people say, they can change what people think and, in some cases, what actually becomes real.  

Presentism 

Presentism is the belief that the moral framework of societies is constant- that what is seen as right and wrong today was right and wrong 100 years ago and 1000 years ago.   What is good and just today was good and just for indigenous communities before contact, it was good and just for the ancient Egyptians and probably for aliens across the galaxy.   The comedian Bill Maher has recently and conveniently done a clip on presentism

Bill Maher @billmaher

In today's world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it's the truth that has to apologize. #Presentism

Modern western generations born and raised before social media and streaming were fully aware of the progress of culture.  They understood, and understand how society’s changing norms, values, technology, expectations and fashions shift as time passes.  However, young people today have almost complete and instant access to the omnipresent culture of yesteryear.  They can watch two Simpson’s episodes back-to-back, one from 1990 and the other from 2017, with all the show’s cultural and social commentary- without living within the historical context.  Culture to them can appear very flat.   Without a sense of direction, it is difficult to find your way around.  This lends itself to being vulnerable to the idea of presentism.

Most ideologies and religions claim to hold a monopoly on the truths they espouse, and the woke are no different.  Presentism works perfectly into their ideology of underlying structures of oppression, and they use it liberally, together with a contrived and overly simplistic view of history. 

Cancel culture in the 17th century. 

Marauding Seaborne Raiders from the North

A starting point fallacy is an error in assessing the initial conditions of a given situation.  If you don’t know where things started you can’t tell where things are going, or how far they’ve come.  

The woke’s all around abuse of history includes this fallacy, which ranges from excesses in cherry-picking to outright fantasy.   To them, history went wrong sometime in the early renaissance, when Europeans started the great Age of Exploration.  Prior to this, the woke believe societies and civilizations around the world lived in relative peace and harmony, with diverse views on religion, gender, and sexuality.  People were governed by just rulers, multiculturalism existed almost everywhere and was very successful.   

Then, according to the woke, like the Viking raiders, the Europeans showed up and conquered them.  Over the course of centuries, Europeans, justified through their Christian faith, variously enslaved, murdered, and committed genocide on an unprecedented scale across the globe, all the while imposing their patriarchal, homophobic and sex-binary culture on the peoples they subjugated.   This allowed the Europeans to prosper, and the wealth disparity around the world is the result of this. 

It is difficult to describe the woke position without sounding like it’s a strawman, but that just reflects how terribly the woke argument is framed.   The most generous that can be said, is that their re-framing of history within a purely oppressive/victimhood lens leads to the above nonsense when presented with more nuanced counterarguments.    (For an explanation why it is nonsense, read just about any non-woke book on history, and here are a couple of good articles:

1. Two Cheers for Colonialism

2. Violence Against History

The reason for this stupidity is that the woke see everything through the postmodern power structure argument- that truths are just constructs made up to exercise power over someone.   Their understanding of history is therefore purely utilitarian – they cherry-pick the stories that contribute to their narrative.   When actual history doesn’t fit, that’s okay – it can be rejected as being a Eurocentric, patriarchal narrative and a more amenable truth is ‘discovered’.  As they have legions of followers in academia, especially in positions of power, they can publish just about any nonsense to provide a counter-argument.

The Royal Navy stopping the slave trade…

End (for now)

Fundamentally, wokeism arises out of errors in how meaning and culture work.  The woke tend to think meaning is embedded in the language itself and is not external to it.  They can even go so far as to say that words shape and form reality; they fall into solipsism.   They are patching over problems that they do not know how to solve. 

This leads them to believing that objectivity is not accessible, therefore any truth can be substituted in. It might as well be theirs and consequences be damned... because there are no meaningful consequences. 

They don’t really care about the facts that are presented to them; they care about their narrative winning.  The best that those who oppose wokeism can hope for is to reveal to the moderates and the unconvinced the depths of the woke’s dishonesty.   

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read - Why we need the word ‘Woke’