Left Is Not Woke

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SN: There’s something to that. I’ve met people who are so put off by woke ideas that they say they’re moving towards the center or the center-Right. But what’s more common is that people who would be on the Left are getting out of political engagement, because they feel that the Left has been captured. I end the book by reminding people how the fascists came to power in 1933: if leftists had formed a united front against fascism, the world would’ve been spared a terrible war. The problem is that the Left always eats its own children and misses the real danger. Donald Trump really could become president again. Le Pen could beat Macron if elections were held today. The president of the biggest country in the world is a fascist according to my Indian friends. The dangers of our time are very real, and we need to strengthen our own ranks. oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry. Kant’s search for universal values led him not toward notions of European superiority but away from them.

Theresa May, Britain’s fourth-most-recent prime minister, has a book to sell. In a recent interview, the former Conservative leader declared herself “woke and proud.” In The Abuse of Power, she cites an Oxford English Dictionary definition of woke as being “well-informed, up to date and chiefly alert to racial discrimination and injustice.” She told her interviewer: “And on that basis, who would not want to be woke?”

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SN: That’s exactly right. All you have to do is to descend from the abstract to particular cases and you find way more international agreements. She is not for a moment seeking to minimize those traumas but rather to critique the emphasis on suffering as the most important marker of collective identity. There are good reasons for the decline of that mindset—the dissolution of the industrial working class in most of the West and the apparent global triumph of consumer capitalism being the most obvious. The effect, though, is that in the absence of a common vocabulary of oppression, suffering can only be “group specific.” The irony, moreover, is that even as the idea of pain as a shared experience recedes, it also becomes universalized in a tribal form. If suffering is the language of identity, every group must learn to use its emotional grammar. Self-pity becomes generalized, and the weaker the excuses for it, the more passionately felt it must be. Even billionaires can be victims—if all else fails, there is always the woke mind virus.

c.) Wokeism doesn’t really believe in progress. Again, I agree with Neiman. The Enlightenment, as we know from Steve Pinker’s two big books ( Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), always rested on beliefs that progress was possible, even if not always achieved. One example I can adduce is civil rights. The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence. Susan Neiman:So, I decided to write a book called "Learning from the Germans" and I did, it was the only time in my life that I've ever done imperial research. I had a great time doing it, I have to say. I interviewed many, many people both in Germany and I had sabbatical, so I spent half a year in Mississippi deciding to go to the deep south, which is of course, you can't say that Mississippi is typical although many people do say Mississippi has the best and the worst of America. And it's like, everything is under a magnifying glass. So, I stayed there following activists who are working on dealing with this history, and learning from them and interviewing them. And yes, you said journalistic, I had two separate people in Germany who are completely different from each other describe the book as a road movie which I'm rather pleased by.Susan Neiman is one of our most careful and principled thinkers on the genuine left. In this nuanced and impassioned plea for universalism she has done a public service for readers of every political stripe. If an alliance of conservatives, liberals, and progressives is to succeed in fending off an increasingly undemocratic far right, lucid thinking is our only hope. Left Is Not Woke is an urgent and powerful intervention into one of the most pressing struggles of our time.” Sadly, I was disappointed in her book. The first problem is that she doesn’t deal much with what “wokeness” really is, nor give examples of it to buttress her thesis. And Neiman’s thesis is this: she’s a big fan of the Enlightenment, and thinks that Leftism (unlike Liberalism, which is wedded to capitalism) is the political instantiation of her admired Enlightenment values. SN: The problem is that you can make the same relativist claim about “indigenous” customs and traditions that are even worse, like Female Genital Mutilation. Someone like Narendra Modi is a perfect example of the misuse of such post-colonial rhetoric and claims about indigeneity. Yes, human rights were originally formalized as a concept in Europe, though versions of them exist in other cultures. But for all of the very real harms of British colonialism in South Asia, do we really want to say it was wrong for them to protest and to forbid suttee (the burning of widows)? Neiman devotes a chapter to each of these components of wokeness, laying out their ideological forebears and then skilfully dismantling their logic. First, she explores how the abandonment of principles in favour of identity has led to an essentialist thinking that mirrors (reflecting and inverting) the worst of the right’s tribalism, lending increased cachet to personal legacies of misery, a development that undercuts the potential for justice. Echoing her earlier book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008), Neiman writes, ‘[v]ictimhood should be a source of legitimation for claims of restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether’ (17). While the idea of intersectionality was intended to emphasize the multiplicity of identities under which we operate in different contexts, woke ideology employs those identities as multipliers of marginalization, thus further essentializing identity rather than complicating it. In this context, all anyone deemed non-marginalized can be is an ‘ally,’ an idea Neiman dismisses out of hand: ‘I am not an ally. Convictions play a minor role in alliances, which is why they are often short […] To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what standing left means’ (31).

The “woke” have been called many things. Conservative polemicists have variously derided social-justice-oriented activists, institutions, and corporations as mob-like, “ un-American,” and “insane.” But in her new book, the philosopher Susan Neiman tags the “woke” with a more stinging and unusual description: objectively not left wing. Class politics, underwritten by Marxist theory, provided at least one way of doing exactly that: thinking about pain not only as a personal or group experience but as a public condition produced by the ways economies and societies work. It was possible to recognize, for example, that a straight white male coal miner enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality but also suffered oppression and exploitation as a worker. It was possible fiercely to oppose systemic injustices without suggesting that those who escaped their very worst effects were just as guilty as those who created them. Philosophy, for Susan Neiman, is a martial art. Her sharp argument that woke is not left because left is universalist while woke is progressive-styled tribalism will stir a much-needed debate.” SN: I’ve only had one review from a conservative who wrote something along the lines of: “You have to wade through a lot of leftist bullshit to get there, but she makes some good points.” It’s pretty clear that I’m not being instrumentalized by the Right. SN: I see how you could use it that way. But first of all let me ask the question. When you say “Take the mind of a hunter-gatherer two million years ago,” how have you taken that mind? How has anybody? I have to admit that this was the part of my book that I was the least certain of, so I asked my friend Philip Kitcher, who has written at least two books on evolutionary psychology, to read it and please tell me where I got things wrong. He made a couple of minor suggestions, but he thought that I got the heart of the thing right. Evolutionary psychology is the biggest example of a pseudoscience that ever became so respectable. But they have zero sources to go on. Yes, evolution works slowly, but we don’t have access to the mind of a hunter gatherer. We can look at their bones and various archaeological relics, but talk about their minds is sheer speculation. And even if we knew what our ancestors were thinking two million years ago, we have absolutely no reason to believe that we have the same drives and motivations as they do, because in the intervening two million years cultures have also evolved.Susan Neiman:Because the Enlightenment wrote the metaphysics of universal human rights. And in fact, I wouldn't have seen it this way at the time, but it completely hooked up with the moral and political influences of my childhood. The challenge in these discussions is finding a definition of ‘woke’ .Woke is a fuzzy concept that, like ‘fascist,’ often means nothing more than ‘something the speaker disagrees with. As the left leaning Australia Institute noted;