BBC Sounds | Analysis
The Roots of ‘Woke’ Culture
Released On: 23 Mar 2020
Woke culture continues to become ever-more relevant to people in all walks of life, and this led to a recent BBC audio-documentary featuring feminist author Helen Lewis and produced by Craig Templeton Smith, “The Roots of ‘Woke’ Culture.” Given nothing more than its highly specialized use of language, it’s almost impossible to deny Woke culture has deep roots in a particular branch of the academic literature within the “theoretical humanities.” This is a matter of some controversy, and interest is picking up around it lately.
Lewis and Smith reached out to James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, among many other academics and commentators including comedian Konstantin Kisin and writer Toby Young, to explore this. In particular, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose were invited to discuss ways “Grievance Studies”—a name they gave an approach to cultural studies that relies upon appealing to and magnifying social grievances, especially based on identity—might contribute to “woke” culture. The “hoax” trio argue persuasively that much of woke culture has its roots in the Grievance Studies scholarship and further that these roots are profoundly postmodern in orientation, drawing heavily on the social Theorizing of Michel Foucault (though the Neo-Marxist influence of scholars in the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, is definitely felt). Other scholars interviewed for the documentary disagree.
We urge you to sit down and have a listen to this half-hour documentary about the roots of woke culture and see what you think. See if you agree with Lindsay and company that woke culture is, in fact, the combination of radical “New Left” activism and postmodern theory for the purposes of pushing a particular form of identity politics. Agree or no, let us know what you think below!
3 comments
I agree in principle with the contention that ‘woke’ politics is rooted in ‘postmodernism’ and may have adopted principles from the ‘new left’ . I further assert that the synthesis has evolved into what I think of as a quasi-religious belief system. Quasi-religious because there is no appeal to a superhuman authority; a belief system because the tenants must be accepted, in toto, without proof or justification, which in my view is the definition of a a belief. Any contradictions or other ‘problems’ are assumed away – information avoidance (see: Golman, et.al, J. Econ Literature, 2017) . The common dismissal is “you don’t get it” sounds much like the dismissal of religious heretics for that reason. In my view, the quasi-religious nature of the belief renders it impervious, or nearly so, to critiques and leads to the politics of identity problems and logical inconsistency (e.g. critics of racism that support foreign racist regimes). More generally, the general lack of critical thinking extends to popular authors turning up in ‘policy classes’ (e.g. Sapiens in a policy analysis course) despite its factual errors and thinly supported assertions.
At the risk of abusing the commenting privilege, I wish to point out that the lack of critical thinking extends into public policy in pernicious ways. For instance, the current Sustainable Development Goals fail to take into account inflation. This means that they will feel good about all the poverty related ‘goals’ in 2030 without having made material changes in the living conditions of the people they claim to care about. The SDG are one international example of the problem, which extends to national, regional, and local policy environments around the world.
James–how could you link to this piece? It’s so clearly stacked against you and Helen and Peter. We’ll get some nonsense from someone like Will Smith denying that there is any real issue with wokeness at all, then a little snippet from you, then it’s right back to Will Smith again. You’re just being sandwiched in-between your critics. The interviewer doesn’t even let the three of you discuss how post modernism gave birth to Wokeness–instead she lets one of your critics immediately dismiss the idea without you even being able to discuss it. Were you happy with this piece?