What to Make of the Woke

Four years ago, many Americans first became aware that a corrosive intellectual and cultural movement had gained authority over our schools, colleges, and universities. They witnessed the lessons that their children and grandchildren were receiving through remote instruction while schools were closed and noticed that many of the lessons were unfactual and misleading. They watched both peaceful and lawless protests in many American cities and wondered from what planet the protesters had descended. And as they listened carefully to the rhetoric of college and university students, many patriotic and law-abiding Americans were alarmed to discover that many of our fellow Americans view our nation as inherently and irredeemably racist, sexist, and unjust on dozens of other counts.

Champions of this emerging movement cited injustices both real (e.g. exclusionary zoning, the erosion of the presumption of innocence) and imagined (e.g. color-blind merit tests, laws protecting unborn human beings from murder) as evidence that American institutions cannot be improved or redeemed but must either be co-opted or destroyed. Teachers and activists in the movement called themselves “woke.” The neologism stuck, partly because it expresses how thoroughly and radically divided are the movement’s proponents from its critics.

Those within the movement reject every artifact of the dominant culture as tools of oppression, including its words and symbols: It’s not sufficient to be “awake” to the experiences of others. New words are needed to make possible new conceptual categories.

Those outside the movement also accepted the term, for it seemed to evince a naïve sanctimony: Sure, kid. See how well your special vocabulary works when you interview for a job.

But wokeness is not just the manifestation of youthful arrogance. It’s an entirely different way of viewing America, the world, and all of reality. It’s the cultural and political expression of a powerful idea. That idea was imported into elite American universities a half century ago and has been patiently filtering down to EdD and PhD programs in flyover country, and from there into schools. It took root in our educational institutions a generation ago and now has a firm hold on the minds of hundreds of thousands of young Americans.

You cannot eradicate this idea by banishing it from schools and libraries. Indeed, the character of the idea is to grow stronger the more you try to suppress it or prohibit its expression. It feeds on opposition and grows stronger when challenged by new laws, boycotts, book bans, and other exercises of political, economic, and cultural power.

You have good reason to be alarmed by wokeness. But you’ll never beat wokeness while playing its game on its terms. And you’ll continue playing its game on its terms, and continue losing the minds and hearts of our young people, if you don’t understand the game that the woke are playing.

The fundamental idea from which wokeness derives its power is this: Everything that we hold in common is socially constructed by those in power. What the unwoke call “reality” is an arbitrary collection of artificial constructs, made of artificial language and concepts, which the educated woke refer to as “discursive regimes.”

• The rule of law is not real. It is a discursive regime that the powerful use to create crime and liability and to deny recognition to subjective experiences that they do not value. We don’t need legal institutions to punish criminals and hold people accountable for wrongdoing. That gets things exactly backward. Law creates the language and conceptual categories of “right” and “wrong,” “sanction and “remedy.” Thus, law creates criminals and tortfeasors.

• Justice is not real. Like all the other virtues (e.g. courage, wisdom, fidelity, temperance, charity), justice is a discursive regime created by European males to privilege activities that help them preserve their privileged perch atop society. Justice is not a virtue to be pursued and internalized within a person. That gets things inside out. Justice is an end state out there in the world. We will have justice when those who are now out of power can look out into the world and see an external recognition and affirmation of their own, internal subjective experiences.

• Language is not real. Language is not a means to communicate knowledge of truth. Indeed, there is no objective reality that language could transmit from one human mind to another. Language does not communicate. Language signifies. Each part of a language—each word—signifies a relation to another part of a language—another word. Each word is created by some personal subject in a vain attempt to transmit his own personal experience to another personal subject for external recognition and approval. The whole of language is a sand dune of constantly-shifting grains, sliding over each other and colliding until they are swept away to make room for new grains.

Logic and reason are not real. Art and literature are not real. Religion is not real. Family businesses, contract and property rights, and economies are not real. All of those are arbitrary discursive regimes created by those in power to gain and maintain cultural, economic, or political power.

If none of that is real, then what is real? In woke world, the only true thing is personal experience. What each of us experiences—one’s own senses, feelings, emotions, and preferences—is what constitutes one’s own true, personal identity. But because each of us has his own experiences and not the experiences of anyone else, the most true thing about each of us is precisely what divides us from each other. Personal experience is neither shared nor real until another person affirms and acknowledges it as part of a shared, discursive regime. Discursive regimes are the tools we use to become real, to define the terms and conditions that make it possible for another person to acknowledge that my experiences matter. That I exist.

Discursive regimes are not ways of knowing truth (there is no such thing) but merely ways of defining some people’s experiences into existence and other people’s experiences out of existence. For example, a discursive regime that identifies male and female with chromosomes and biological sex defines out of existence the subjective experiences of those with gender dysphoria, who experiences themselves as trapped in the wrong biological sex.

So, the stakes are very high. They are existential. When the woke protest that your language and logic erase them from existence, they are not purposefully using hyperbole. They really believe it.

The game of woke is to displace what the unwoke naively call “reality.” It is to disrupt all the dominant discursive regimes and to replace them with new discursive regimes that empower those whose experiences are not recognized in our language, institutions, and cultural practices. This game is all about the exercise of power. It’s a zero-sum contest for the right to decide whose experiences are real and whose experiences are not.

This is why you can’t reason with woke. Reason itself is just another discursive regime. But it’s also why you can’t use law, shame, economic pressure or other means of coercion to defeat wokeness. The power of the woke just is their narrative that the only thing you care about is power. To use political, economic, or cultural power alone to beat back the woke is to empower the narrative that fuels the woke movement.

The only answer to wokeness is to put forward an alternative way of understanding, which accounts for and addresses the concerns of the woke but rejects their nihilistic assumptions. There is such an alternative. It’s a way of understanding human nature, knowledge, language and logic, justice, and everything else about us which connects us to what is real, what we share in common. It orients us to what is true and good, not just for one person or some minority group, but for everyone.

This alternative way of understanding is called “natural law.” The idea of natural law has been around for millenia. An ancient and robust tradition of thought is devoted to it. And it’s making a comeback. Over the next several days, I’ll post here about the idea of natural law, and why it’s an attractive rival to woke.