The fight against the ideology called Wokeness is gaining ground for the first time in a decade, if not decades. People increasingly understand what it is and why it is a terrible, inhuman, and inhumane ideology that has no place governing our societies. They also increasingly and rightly see it as a puritanical religious movement built upon a perverse faith, which they are starting to reject. They also increasingly understand it to be a takeover ideology with profound roots in totalitarian, racist, and communist thought that should not be empowered and must be fought. Certainly, we have a great deal of work still to do, especially practically, to fight this ideology and its remarkable bid to take over our society and culture, but people are waking up. Though I may look a bit far down the road in saying so, now we need somewhere to go.
If we continue fighting back—for pushing back is no longer enough—intelligently and firmly against the ideology of Critical Social Justice and the Woke movement it has spawned, we will find ourselves on the road to a post-Woke world, and it is not yet clear what that might look like. It is therefore necessary now, even this early in this ideological war, to set the values that should guide us into a post-Woke era so that we might enter a new era of flourishing and prosperity after this diabolical attempt to snuff out the light of Western civilization and human freedom. These values must be comprehended and asserted starting now as we begin the next phase in the fight to leave Woke ideology behind us, hopefully in the dustbin of history. Here, I offer four cardinal values to orient ourselves toward for the establishment of a post-Woke world that’s full of promise and prosperity. These are truth, beauty, liberty, and merit.
Truth
Truth is the truth, and it is above all the first virtue and guiding light of a post-Woke world. That is, a post-Woke world must be based on the relentless and uncompromising pursuit of objective truth, external to any particular individual or affinity group or its nearest approximation. Your truth will not do; neither will my truth. These are subjective heuristics useful in your own life but meaningless beyond that, and it’s time we remembered that fact. The weight of evidence, power of reason, and process of what has been termed “liberal science” must bear on every claim upon the truth in an honest effort to keep what is of value there and discard that which is in error.
The truth is humbling, and it is liberating in the genuine sense of the word. We, as mere men, are subject to the truth of the world and the truths of our own nature as beings in this world, and we are not above them. We can understand “your truth” and “my truth” merely as suggestions—not conclusions—in a broader conversation upon which reason, evidence, and criticism must bear. The goal is understanding the world as it is, including ourselves, our place within it, and how we might best relate to one another. It is the pursuit of getting things right, knowing that any discomfort this creates will protect against greater discomforts when the lie of our folly is eventually revealed to us by the world itself. Lies may for long be sustained against people, but they cannot be sustained against the world, which merely is and doesn’t change because we hope it will or, in our smallness and fear, believe we need it to.
We have no options except to humble ourselves before that which is true or to rise in our hubris against it only to eventually be humiliated by it. By recognizing this, we can orient ourselves with that which is true—what many of faith have called God, or what the Daoists have referred to as Dao, the Way—and free ourselves from the limitations of our own short-sightedness, stupidity, and greed. The Daoists believe that when man goes with the Way—how it is, truly—then he is free and things go well. It is by asserting ourselves against the Way that we create our own catastrophes and suffer the inevitable consequences. By humbling ourselves to how the world really is, which is to the truth, we free ourselves from the suffering that always follows from the disastrous combination of ignorance and pride.
Ironically, there is little need for any individual in a society that values truth to know much truth or even to pursue it with the sort of rigor we expect out of an idealized scientist. Everyone can push their own ideas, which likely often serve their own narrow interests and spring from their own narrow understanding, so long as they are humbled before the process that, in the end, defers to truth. This process has been identified as requiring only two general principles: no one has special authority and no one gets final say. Insights must be put up against other insights in a conversation that never ends, and thus no one becomes empowered as the arbiter of truth, which would inherently be corrupting—a point the postmodernists were right about in the wrong way. Once these principles are combined with a general attitude of respect for reason and deference to evidence and methodology, we have oriented ourselves toward the truth. Thus, these values must be sacred to man, and they must serve as the basis for a post-Woke world.
The call to center truth in a post-Woke world is a call to rekindle the Enlightenment and reawaken its brightest lights, which are currently being dimmed and even snuffed out. It is the rejection of the foolish arrogance of radical subjectivity in favor of an imperfect but worthy goal of discovery. It is to understand the world as it is so that we might flourish in it as it is. To value the truth is to eschew fantasy and ideology and embrace reality, and a great lesson of history is that, though this is difficult, it is possible. Societies flourish and prosperity follows when we orient toward the truth. Valuing and desiring the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as it is said, in those places where it matters most—must therefore be the first pillar of the post-Woke world we aim to inhabit.
Beauty
A world without beauty is a dead world. A world filled with beauty that no one can appreciate is identically dead. Beauty is the second value around which a post-Woke world should be built. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, and that may be stated fairly enough, but beauty cannot be systematically snuffed out because others who behold it deem it problematic. No person has the right to squash the beauty beheld by another, and it is a crime against humanity to engage in such a project at the ideological scale. To dictate what is and what is not beautiful is to rob humanity of its humanity. It cannot be the basis for any healthy society.
Beauty is aspirational, and, though it may in specific be subjective, there is something in beauty that goes beyond the subjective, not into an objective realm (as does truth) but into a transcendent one that is in its own way bigger than man. The ancient Greeks referred to this aspirational ideal as arete: excellence. Christians, Jews, and Muslims see it in their transcendent God and rightly understand that it is universal through its transcendence.
Though we may all judge beauty by our own standards, we all have a sense of excellence—thus of beauty—when we see it. Excellence of form, excellence of execution, excellence of aesthetics, excellence of being. Beauty is not merely that which people believe to be pleasing to the eye or mind; it is that which exhibits arete. Beauty is that which is excellent in that which it intends to be.
Beauty is therefore a necessary virtue in a society that will flourish because it is, above all else, that which encourages and defines flourishing. Truth, by comparison, is merely necessary, but it is not sufficient. Truth is all head with no heart. Without beauty to grant inspiration and aspiration, truth is cold and even demoralizing. We may obtain right answers and thus avoid certain calamities, but we have little to live for in a perfectly orderly brutalist world. Truth is science; beauty is art, and thus beauty is humanity. Beauty is that supplemental necessity which inspires us and enables our subjectivity in a way that is not merely selfish but that, in its transcendence, lifts us up and all others with us. Beauty is what makes life worth living. It is also what makes that which is worth doing well worth doing at all. Beauty grants sufficiency to life.
The call to center beauty in a post-Woke world is a call to a Second Renaissance that pulls humanity up and out of the cynical, pessimistic mire of modernism and postmodernism. It is a call to aspire to excellence for the sake of excellence in everything that can be made excellent. Beauty—excellence—is the opportunity to elevate whatever it is we do to the highest level, and it is what reminds us that the hard slog of life is worth living, if only for the rare glimpse of that which stirs man through its beauty. Beauty is a call to be better in everything we do, build, and aspire to be. It is a cornerstone of a flourishing post-Woke world.
Liberty
No society is worth inhabiting if it is not geared to secure the liberty of its citizens. Liberty—the birthright of man—is therefore a necessary condition of any flourishing society and the chief object that any functioning state must secure for its citizens. Liberty, which Woke ideology threatens in its relentless bid for power (which it confuses with empowerment), is thus a necessary component of a post-Woke society and is its third core value.
As the Woke have successfully leveraged, and as the great Liberals of the Enlightenment realized, liberty exists in uneasy tension with two important forces: security and liberty itself. Liberty is freedom, and freedom is dangerous. When a man finds himself in dangerous circumstances, though, he is less able to be as free as he would be in safer conditions. In such situations, he is constrained to do what he must to secure his own well-being, or that of others for whom he will voluntarily sacrifice, in place of what he might otherwise do and enjoy more. He must go according to the situation—that is, recognize and act in accordance with the truth—or risk losing everything. Security is therefore productive of liberty and restrictive of it, placing them in tension. Further, my liberty and your liberty exist in a similar uneasy tension because what I choose to do in my own freedom may well restrict yours, or vice-versa. In this regard, liberty is a balancing act between many individuals who must find ways to come to agreements—called societies—that, ideally, maximize every individual’s liberties as they exist in tension with one another.
For both of these reasons, liberty requires responsibility. Indeed, liberty—along with the security that enables its exercise—is responsibility’s reward. People must take enough responsibility to maintain their own security and to increase the security of their communities, which benefits them as well as the whole, and they must therefore be willing to sacrifice some of their liberties to do so. They must do the same with regard to the balance of their own liberties with those of others, for the more responsibility each individual takes for his own circumstances, the less others have to take up that slack. Understanding the need to take up responsibility is, when generally practiced, the antidote to the sort of resentment that, when it grows metastatic, tears down civilizations. Being willing to shoulder that burden is easiest in the name of liberty, which therefore must be valued.
The challenges of liberty highlight the fundamental tension of the human condition, which the Woke have greatly threatened: the balancing act between the individual and the collective. Liberty only makes sense in the realm of the individual, who has agency, feelings, and intelligence. Liberty makes no sense in terms of groups, which have none of these things and, indeed, are ultimately composed of individuals. By focusing on liberty, we focus on individualism over collectivism, and we understand that teamwork—the formation of purpose-driven, voluntary “collectives”—becomes possible. Collectivism—enforced “teamwork,” which is not the same as broad civic-mindedness—never works, and the reason is that it violates individual liberty and thus generates the seeds of its own destruction, which are apathy, alienation, and resentment. It is in the balancing of liberty between individuals that we find another key value, which is equality, for that which diminishes equality before the law or via prejudice denies the affected individuals their liberty.
The Woke doctrine of “liberation” gets these issues backwards. It wrongly believes that liberty emerges from enforced equality rather than understanding that equality results from valuing liberty. It also favors absolute security, provided by a perfected state that cannot exist, on the belief that the responsibility we have against our insecurities constrains our freedom to do whatever we would. In this way, it vainly hopes that liberty might be enjoyed without responsibility to self, others, or society. Thus, “liberation” is a utopian dream (not a “historical possibility”), and the attempt to realize it will always end in calamity, suffering, bondage, and death. These tragedies of utopia are guaranteed because the fantasy of liberation—communist or otherwise—puts liberty last rather than first, eschews responsibility as a limit on freedom rather than its precondition, and does so proceeding upon the dangerously naive, in fact ridiculous, assumption that perfect security (which ideally “should” exist) is attainable. The world is not ideal, how it “should be” in the minds of dreamers, however. It is how it is and, though changeable, is limited in its malleability—this is the truth.
Since perfect security cannot exist, it cannot be the starting point of any serious philosophy upon which a society can be built. Woke ideology wrongly believes otherwise and, starting upon that fraudulent assumption, seeks to solve the problem of the unperfectable state through enforced collectivism and the denial of any individual agency, will, or liberty. The state will be perfected, they believe, only when everyone fully embraces their ideology and submits to it rather than to the world as it is. This is a violation of the human condition (denial of truth) and a murder of the human spirit (rejection of beauty), and so it always ends in catastrophe. Woke “liberationism” must therefore be rejected in favor of individual liberty because its dream is, in reality, a nightmare.
A post-Woke world must be wiser and therefore hedge its understanding of liberty toward individualism and thus to the willful bearing of responsibility. We will be rewarded for doing so. To center liberty in a post-Woke world is to center the possibility of opportunity. It is the path to flourishing, prosperity, and well-earned satisfaction, if happiness cannot ultimately be obtained in the pursuit. Liberty is not the condition of a free society; it is its reward. In turn, liberty is not the result of a secure society; a secure society is the reward of responsibility, which arises most earnestly in the desire to be free.
Merit
Merit is the measure upon which a flourishing society is built. It is oriented on results and is the combination of talent and effort. Therefore, merit paves the road to a prosperous society. Merit means getting results. A post-Woke society must put getting results first because results produce everything that society depends upon and most of what it enjoys. We must therefore value merit.
Prosperity and flourishing, thus happiness and fulfillment, and also security and freedom, all depend upon getting results. Without good results, bad things happen. When the storm comes, we have either prepared our house to weather it or we have not. Reality is not fantasy, and we cannot just wish the storm away or talk our way out of its injuries. Results matter, and merit is the measure of getting results.
Moreover, whether we like it or not, the world is competitive. Should one individual or a whole society put other interests ahead of getting results—ahead of merit—others will recognize this mistake and capitalize upon it. Those interested in security, whether individual or national, would be wise to remember this truth sooner rather than later, for our enemies have not forgotten it. The maelstrom that’s coming, in other words, might be whipped up by man rather than by nature, and those who value merit more have the best chance of surviving it.
Because we are humans, we are biased, and recognizing this is part of our deferral to truth. We tend toward favoritism of those we know or like—or far more crudely, those “like us,” perhaps only in looks or phenotype—and so merit is too easily forgotten in the name of corruptions like favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, country-clubism, and bigotry. A society that values merit is not free from these corruptions, but it abhors them and seeks to minimize them.
Also because we are humans, we are limited. Merit cannot always win the day because we have to make our decisions from within the limits of that which we know. This is not a strike against merit, however, as many contend. It’s a call to broaden our horizons without compromising our standards.
Furthermore, because the world is not fair (and never will be), talent is not evenly distributed or evenly discoverable, sometimes for bad reasons (which we should hope to minimize in light of the other values presented here). Nevertheless, the adage that chance favors the prepared mind rings true, and merit is therefore not merely luck but the ability to make use of luck through the application of hard work and character, which are, in at least some significant respects, often well within the range of our control.
Note well that merit implies individualism, again alongside liberty. This is because a successful group is composed of successful individuals who know how to work together as a team and who are willing to. The weakest link in any team effort diminishes the group’s capacity to get results, as does its failures of teamwork. Thus, no matter how important teamwork may be to success—and it is, itself, an individual skill that can be developed—merit is at bottom an individual quality. So, as with liberty, merit evokes the individual. Even in team efforts, the skill of teamwork and meritorious achievement in that skill is necessary for success, and individual willingness to participate in the team effort outperforms collectivists demands to do so in all but the most perilous of circumstances. The skill of teamwork, facilitated by the skill of leadership, nonetheless, falls on each individual in the group, not the group itself.
Valuing merit produces results and minimizes corruption. It spurs innovation and entrepreneurship. It lifts societies. A post-Woke society must therefore value merit as highly as other seemingly more lofty ideals like truth, beauty, and liberty. We must care about results, and we should reward those who get them. Merit is the way.
Justice?
What, though, about justice? Surely, if the ideology we are seeking to overcome focuses itself on justice, albeit badly, justice must also be a cardinal virtue of a society that would overcome that ideology, right? I disagree.
Justice is, to my thought, a second-order value in society, one that follows from getting the cardinal values right to serve as a foundation for justice. Indeed, I think this is one of the great lessons of the Woke “Critical Social Justice” era that free societies everywhere and in all times should pay attention to—a society that places justice ahead of deeper virtues is a society in imminent danger. Justice is necessary for a flourishing society, but it is also more subjective than other values, and therein lies the danger. Those with power to dictate what justice looks like may not have the right foundation upon which to judge, for that judgment to be truly just must be principled and blind. This lesson we have learned in a hard way over the last decade in particular. Justice has been the mantle of those with a crooked, unprincipled foundation, and rampant injustice in Justice’s name has been our reward.
This is to say that justice cannot lead but must follow from deeper principles if it is to exist at all. Indeed, even though any society that neglects justice will be a sick society, only a sick society would dare to put justice first. Justice must proceed from values like those listed above: truth, beauty, liberty, and merit.
Classically, Justice is depicted as a woman blindfolded, holding out scales in one hand and a sword in the other. This is the ideal from which justice springs. She is beautiful, and in being blinded she is interested only in what is true without partiality. She holds a sword to defend any against infringements against their own liberty and to punish those who would violate this sacred trust, and she carries scales to weigh out the merits of every situation, which returns us again to truth. Justice is the result of these deeper principles, not that which generates them.
Without truth—as impartial and objective as that can be—surely there is no justice. This follows from the simple fact that outside of truth, which is impartial and the same for all, all judgment rests only in power, which is corrupting and can as easily be held by the narrow, the capricious, the ignorant, or the evil as it can by the wise, the fair, the reasonable, and the good. Those who hold power will always be tempted to identify as just that which benefits them, and this is guaranteed to deliver injustice to those whose circumstances they do not understand, do not value, and do not like. A standard outside of any such empowered cabal is therefore necessary to effect justice in the world, and such a standard must be based upon the truth, the light of reason, and an impartial standard such a system of law before which all citizens are treated as equals.
Without beauty, which is to say an eye to that which is genuinely good, surely there is no justice. Beauty is the aspiration to an ideal of goodness—though not a naive vision of perfection—and when those who are entrusted to mete justice for a society are content only with what’s “good enough,” injustice will be the result. As injustice is ugly in the mind and heart of all who encounter it, justice depends upon a notion of beauty—of excellence in the sense of arete—to come into existence. Ugly justice may sometimes have to serve in ugly moments, but in the same breath it serves as the impetus to improve. Justice itself, when achieved under a high standard of excellence, is beautiful in turn.
Without liberty, certainly there is no justice. An injustice is done against any man whose liberty is restricted without sufficient cause, which is always rooted in grounded claims that he is infringing upon the liberty of another. Men will—and do—accept reasonable limitations on their liberty for the common good, which is their right as free men and also in their own interest and within the reaches of their compassion, but injustice is there whenever they are forced to think, act, or believe as they wouldn’t, or placed in bondage to serve interests that they wouldn’t, especially when those violate their principles or conscience, unless it is demonstrable to impartial judges that their actions violated the same liberty in others. Men must be free and their liberty must be valued before justice has any hope of coming into the world, and it is in the balance of liberties and the attendant responsibilities that a sense of justice begins to hold any meaning.
Without a basis in merit, justice is always lost in the very attempt to claim it, for the opposite of merit is corruption, with which merit cannot be synthesized. Merit—whether in the fair rewards for applying one’s talent, character, and effort, or merits of each case weighed against one another—is the basis for all justice. Justice is ultimately the fairness that sees people get what they, in truth, deserve and that sees them avoid what they do not deserve. What can reasonably said to be what someone has earned, including by his capacity to capitalize upon his luck, must be the first basis of his reward, and nothing of which a man is innocent can be justly deemed a basis for his demerit, exclusion, or punishment. Where merit falls out of focus, justice cannot be found.
Justice, then, follows from these more basic premises than itself and cannot merely assert itself into the world. Attempting to adjust the facts, skew the ideal, chain man’s liberty, or dethrone merit will always produce a tilted field in which justice is impossible, so attempting to do these evils in the name of justice is little more than an application of hubris, blindness, or malice. These sins are, in perverse ways, also self-rewarding such that they always awaken the worst—and least just—impulses in those empowered by them.
Truth and beauty—what the faithful recognize as God—are bigger than any man and than all men, and we only err by attempting to assert ourselves over them, even in the pursuit of justice. All that places itself ahead of these will do evil, often under the delusion of good. Liberty is the promise granted to every man born into this world if he has any hope of living in a just society, so it precedes the machinations of other men who might seek to order the world according to their own narrow wishes. Merit is the foundation of just decision-making, so it cannot be ignored, supplanted or discounted if a just society is what we desire.
A post-Woke society isn’t tasked with realizing these truths so much as remembering them, as these ideals were already understood before and were the basis for a prosperous society that was steadily and rapidly improving itself toward ever greater justice. A post-Woke society must stop putting the (social) justice cart before the values horse—the values that can and will produce a just society when they are not subverted, supplanted, or interfered with. These values are truth, beauty, liberty, and merit, and these must be the North Star for any society that wishes to climb out of the darkness and back into the light—light that brings prosperity and flourishing to its people and to man. Building the post-Woke world thusly is our charge, then, and these will be our values to build it upon.
51 comments
Regarding “Liberty”, Isaiah Berlin has the issue spot-on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
This is one of the most important New Discourse postings. I have used it to focus my own mind on what matters most. I have used it to reorient family and friends from being merely anti-Woke (and driven by 24/7 news channels) toward something constructive (examine your life and be salt or a light in your corner of the world). For us, this article has become a tool to analyze Woke attacks, a roadmap for effective counterattack, and plain language to explain ourselves.
Alphonse’s proposal to add Family (in the broad metaphorical sense) is interesting. I will likely add that to the list.
Neoplatonist1 is correct that Beauty is always tricky to get our hands around. If I resort to using popular terms, perhaps Beauty is a “right brain” concept that can never be defined satisfactorily per “left brain” standards.
Having reflected on “Family” for a few days, I eventually recognized New Discourses is full of articles and podcasts on this topic. Remembering those, an initial proposal might be: in the same way that truth must be pursued with humility, liberty tempered by responsibility, beauty seasoned with authenticity, and merit open to equity, the value “family” (in a literal sense) must be joined together with hospitality, welcoming friends and strangers into our family (in a broad sense). Otherwise, one may descend into tribalism.
This is a world living according to Hegelian doctrine and dialectics.
The interesting part is, this represents the 1/3 souls who went astray after Satan in that first earth iteration. They are now upon this earth, in this final generation. They are making the identical mistakes they made during that first earth iteration, believing in the same doctrine.
There will be an extremely high cost of living according to the prophets of Hegel and their dialectics. One could easily loose their eternal soul following this type of doctrine, as it will cause them to hate those which they shouldn’t and love those which they should steer clear of. What they are essentially doing is selecting Barabbas over Jesus, or Hatred, Murder and Deceit over Love and Compassion for ones fellow man…
Personally, I don’t find them woke, I find they have allowed themselves to be rocked to sleep by dialectics, disinformation and deception.
Within 45 years however, they will become fully “Woke” 3.5 days after the fake Jesus Christ kills the two witnesses in Jerusalem… On that day they will realize how screwed up they really were, and they will face their punishment from the last 7 plagues…
Yes, that punishment will include all of them , not one of them shall escape…
Interesting.
Unfortunately we are still in a new Babel – with language disconnected from meaning – and it is the language of virtue….
I’ve heard that the Woke have started to discourage describing themselves as Woke, now that we have started speaking against them.
They always play with language. Control the meaning of words and you control the thoughts they lead to.
Keep an eye, or ear out for new terms replacing Woke.
Great essay. Turning away from woke values, we can see what we are turning toward. These are fabulous values. Good contrast with the woke.
I want to see where humor fits in with this. Is it a value? It is something to value. Thinking of Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” It’s a good read, or watch the film if you can find it somewhere. Woke comedians aren’t funny anymore.
Humor seems to be woven into the fabric of the universe. God obviously has a sense of humor if nothing else.
Lindsay sounds a great deal like Plato (in the character of Socrates in THE REPUBLIC) here in his discussion of justice.
Sounds a lot like The Christian Atheist podcast’s most recent addition.
https://youtu.be/kuFIboA0t0c
Itunes – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-christian-atheist/id1553077203
Google – https://podcasts.google.com/u/1/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL1dpc2VXb3Jkc0ZvcllvdXJPY2Nhc2lvbi9mZWVkLnhtbA
iHeartRadio – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-christian-atheist-77405162/
Pandora – https://www.pandora.com/podcast/description/the-christian-atheist/PC:59772
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/4wWaVlpuRgoLOpZDtADBPD
Bravo!
I completely agree with you, the only criticism I have is could “man” be replaced with “human” ?
I think what you’re asking is not a criticism, but a conceit. The truth as to man’s relation to God the Creator and the created world has been available for all to see for a minimum of 3,400 years. This may be found in Genesis chapter one, the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, which would seem to be quite a place of primacy regarding God’s communication of truth and principle to us on this subject. (Excerpted from Genesis 1: 26-28:)
[26] And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion …
[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
[28] And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion … .
The simple, yet profound construction of the English highlights that God uses (in this high level context) the term “man” to refer to all people, and in the specific context, to both Adam and Eve. As, “God created *man,* … in the image of God created he *him;* *male and female* created he *them.*”
Rather than the idea of “man” being exclusionary (e.g., referring only to the male), this shows how God lifts up (or exalts) both male and female by expressing how he sees us as a unity. I think the Founders were expressing the same principle when they called it *a self-evident truth* that all men were created equal.
An interesting essay, although I’m not sure that Merit is not also a second order value. Something to think about.
However for these values to form a New Enlightenment I believe you also need to consider how to deal with (or work around) those people who do not subscribe to those values, either through criminality, mental health issues, inadequacy or contrary beliefs. It is so easy to slip from ‘I have a dream ‘ to ‘You dissent therefore you are a problem’. Best get a framework in place before it is needed – and ‘justice’ is not enough on its own.
I agree that a positive alternative is needed, and I am very pleased to see Beauty on the list.
Wokeness is not rational. For an alternative to compete, it cannot just be rational either. People seem to have a hole that wokeness fills – a void in their souls, god-shaped perhaps. They seek something transcendent, something that takes them outside themselves. Beauty does that. It can take one’s breath away (breath = respire = spirit).
I do not, therefore, see Beauty as equivalent to excellence. Excellence is human creation. It expresses human immanence, not transcendence. It does not encompass nature – one of the chief sources of beauty, and a superior force beyond the reach of human hubris.
Your reference to the Dao is apt. The woke believe that we are gods who can self-create and recreate ourselves, our world, our very natures. Dao teaches that we are caught in the river of existence, but we are not its master.
I think there is another key element missing. Wokeness is strangely both conformist and extraordinarily focused on the individual. It attempts to satisfy the desire for human connection and relationships with a solpsism that must fail. A superior alternative must also address this need for connection.
Community is unfortunately an empty term (whole cities are called “communities,” when they are not). Online relations are clearly on unstable ground. I think human connection should entail human materiality (mater = mother) and commitment to endure. I hesitate to propose it, due to its abuse by the Christian Right, but the obvious choice is Family. Let us allow family to be an excuse for sexism and homophobia, but the family needs to be rehabilitated as a core aspect of life.
Family is material. Family is committed. Family creates meaning and binds us to the circle of life. If I die as an individual, I am dust. As a father, I am but part of a cycle that extends into the past before me and into the future beyond.
Furthermore, Family addresses key injustices that wokeness claims to care about. We know that the destruction of Family leads to much of the inequality we see today, especially among groups whose families have been torn apart by historic racism. The rehabilitation of Family is a precondition for raising up disadvantaged people. Yet wokeness clearly aims to undermine Family.
Finally, you might add Wisdom. Wisdom is not the same as Truth. It is closer to Dao. It helps us accept the limitations and suffering of life. It is the opposite of Utopia. On the one hand, we should struggle to make the world a better place: but we are not gods. We still are mortal.
I agree about justice. An eye for an eye is just, but it is not good. We are better equipped with empathy (actual empathy), generosity, kindness and love than with the hard light of justice.
Truth, Beauty, Liberty, Family, Wisdom. That might be my list (I think merit is implicit in truth and liberty). And expressed not in terms of reason, but in terms of Love. The woke despise the world. They do not love it, or the creatures in it.
Alphonse, to what are you referring with your statement,
“I hesitate to propose it, due to its abuse by the Christian Right, but the obvious choice is Family?”
Do you have some specific issues or examples?
I just endured a company-wide conference and my mega corp has never been more behind this cultural Marxism. NEVER! One executive, a white male, even said we still need much work “to fundamentally change America to protect America’s black and brown communities.” So all my corporation’s talk of inclusion surely doesn’t pertain to those of us philosophically opposed to racial ideologies from the far Left. “Woke liberationism must therefore be rejected in favor of individual liberty because its dream is, in reality, a nightmare…”? Apparently we have a long way to go.
I would argue that Wilber’s view, though similar seeming on the surface, is structurally different from Lindsay’s. Whereas Lindsay labels woke culture as “terrible” and speaks of it like a foreign enemy that must be defeated to return to order, Wilber views it as a necessary stage in cultural and personal evolution that must be embraced, seen of its various limitations, and thus transcended while including its healthy qualities (genuine empathy towards others and animals, allowance of emotional vulnerability, consideration of perspectives that differ from one’s own, recognizing the importance of social justice and collective responsibility, etc.). The attitudes they each take are almost antithetical from one another. It seems Lindsay wants to go straight to the “post” woke stage without integrating the necessary lessons one would only learn from first actually going through the woke stage. It’s a recipe for repression and ultimately suffering as far as I’m concerned.
Wokeness merely claims (and falsely) to be creating conditions that might be “a necessary stage in cultural and personal evolution that must be embraced, seen of its various limitations, and thus transcended while including its healthy qualities (genuine empathy towards others and animals, allowance of emotional vulnerability, consideration of perspectives that differ from one’s own, recognizing the importance of social justice and collective responsibility, etc.).”
These “qualities” are individual human virtues that a society or culture can and should only accommodate, not engineer as “outcomes.” The fact that you can list them as virtues in the first place demonstrates that these qualities, though maybe healthy in themselves, did not arise (or even gain wider acceptance) as the result of wokeness, but wokeness falsely claims to be striving toward such conditions (“genuine empathy,” etc.).
Where wokeness goes wrong is its attempt to create a utopian society in which these virtues are commanded, with individuals punished if they fall short. As of now the punishment is merely social ostracization and banishment from electronic social media. Given the full apparatus of a coercive woke state, would the absence of such virtues require forced “rehabilitation”?
The Woke are lunatics who have nothing to teach any rational person. They are, indeed, terrible and must be defeated to save civilization. I don’t have time left to waste on going through a Woke stage. Wokeness has gone too far already, and has to be terminated as soon as possible.
Of course they couldn’t teach anything to a rational person. The stuff they teach is post-rational which gets interpreted as irrational or pre-rational by all the rational squares out there who don’t understand it precisely because they refuse to go through that stage lol
Spoken like a true Hegelian dialectician! Progress is inevitable, all we have to do is accept EVERYTHING as a positive stage in the evolution of Spirit, including all the “necessary” destruction of what preceded it, and all will go swimmingly! Wrong. Society does not always move forward, and we CAN risk losing everything we’ve accomplished if we embrace the lie. Ask the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe if “embracing” Communism helped improve their societies.
I don’t know Wilber or his thoughts. But Michael, your original comment and your reply to replies on it both are nearly perfect examples of woke dialectical thought/argument. So my question is, are you woke (and don’t realize it), or just a troll?
The issue is that individuals unconnected from the reality of human experience declare that their ‘truth’ is relevant while the rest of the world’s truth is not. Because, most of us who are connected via a set of active empathic tools respect the rights of others, we have let those with less connection to reality dominate the discourse and now the political rule making.
The question is what is ‘truth’?
Most of us have no problem understanding what is true and what is not as we are so used to dealing with making assessments every waking hour that what it is, is invisible to us. We need to define objective truth in terms everyone can understand.
John Sturges – Isn’t that what Modernism was about – defining objective truth and how to find it? You seem to be speaking as a Post-Modernist who’s forgotten that Modernism existed.
You’d probably be surprised to find out that a large portion of the decisions you (we) make on a constant basis are not based on fact (thought we believe they are) but actually your own highly contorted perception. In fact, we are often completely wrong in our assessment of ‘reality’, and regularly make major decisions based on these incorrect perceptions. It doesn’t necessarily mean our decisions are wrong, because we nearly always error on the side of safety/caution.
For an incredibly in-depth dive into how we perceive reality and make decisions, check out the fascinating book: “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral scientist who dedicated his career to researching these phenomena from a scientific perspective.
But ‘objective truth’ is precisely what the woke deny in order to defend their beliefs. They don’t get that facts don’t care about their feelings. This objective truth raises major questions about how we can ever debate or engage with those enslaved by their emotions. If we can’t use reason and evidence against the red fascists and their agenda, then what? Trump chose to treat them with their own medicine of mockery, hostility and rudeness, so driving them into outrage and fully revealing the hate which fuels leftism. It certainly opened my eyes, and is why I am on fora like this today. Does anyone have a better tactic?
In the Jewish tradition, it is well known that truth stands on its own, and falsehood has no basis for standing at all.
The vulnerable value here is Beauty, because the author seems to be trying to have it both ways: beauty as the undefinable subjective whatever, and yet beauty as excellence. The beauty of the excellent serial kill? I suppose even Bikini Atoll’s destruction was beautiful to behold. The value of this part of the essay is that it “keeps the pilot light on” for the only definition of beauty that matters to civilization, namely Classical Beauty.
Nonclassical beauty is subjectivized into nothingness and we shouldn’t even use the word in that sense. Classical beauty, as of Myron, Aeschylus, the Gospels, Da Vinci, Schiller, Bach, and Shakespeare, etc, is not vulnerable to being subjectivized; classical beauty is objectively verifiable. Something like Piet Mondrian might please someone, but it is demonstrably not classically beautiful and therefore is not necessary to civilization.
Not only is beauty a necessary condition for mankind, but anything attractive that isn’t Beautiful is probably merely Interesting. The problem is that not only is most of our society ignorant of the definition and content of classical beauty, except in terms of misleading cliche, but most of society is also addicted to the merely interesting.
Without going further, then, and using the pilot light of beauty=excellence to illuminate the specific content of classical beauty, the word “beauty” will continue to flounder in the shallow waters of relativism, and come to nothing on that account.
The beauty the author mention is what Neitysche calls, “Dionysus and Apollonoan .”
I absolutely agree. There is such thing as universal beauty. The critical theorists, Modernists, post-modernists and company have done a lot to try and undermine the idea of classical or timeless beauty, and it’s arguably been one of the attacks that has made much of the current woke political stuff possible. They first had to pervert the idea of art and human sensibilities. The case of something like the “Rite of Springs” is a perfect example. We see a young girl ritually sacrificed by making her dance herself to death. The audience is supposed to clap for what is essentially the ritualized satanic murder of young girl.
I founded The Chained Muse poetry website to promote precisely this idea of classical beauty, and the promotion of what I like to call 21st century timeless poetry.
If we look to the great tradition of classical Greece, the classical Arabic poets, the Italian of Dante or the works of Shakespeare and Keats, all are examples of the poets expressing the idea of the timeless and immutable in their own age, and in their own unique vernacular.
Here is a quote from Friedrich Schiller’s 9th letter on the aesthetical education of man:
“The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it.”
Right on! T. S. Eliot said that the work of the poet is to “purify the dialect of the tribe”
Dear John,
That’s an interesting quote from Eliot. I do think Eliot is a bit problematic though when it comes to the question of beauty and truth in art.
So purify the language, yes, but there is a rather fascinating paradox among the modernists which is that while they paid very close attention to language, what they often had to say, especially in the case of Eliot, was actually very subjective, often needlessly obscure. Much Modernist poetry often passed off obscurity for depth, or they were simply concerned with creating highly stylized language, “art for art’s sake,” which is what spawned a lot of the painful obscure and self-referential verses found in contemporary poetry.
There is a fundamental crisis in meaning in much modern and contemporary art, and Eliot arguably played a key role in that.
The challenge of creating great or timeless art is in my opinion two-fold: there is the technical and formal aspects of a work which are essential to creating the kind of vehicle necessary for conveying or articulating a very specific nuanced or original idea—craft—but then there is also the question of the idea itself.
A lot of contemporary poets write about the most banal things or objects possible, but they try to do in a highly stylized or “original” manner, which they think gives their work the title of “art.” Something is not “art” just because the person who created it says it is. Highly stylized verses and finely written free-associations are just that, highly stylized verses and finely-written free-associations. That doesn’t make them poetry. The question of idea content and substance is also crucial.
A poet or artist is ultimately presenting us with some idea of a universe, a world, something. When a poet writes a poem, they are giving us a snapshot of the universe which they inhabit. So the question becomes what universe are they in, what kind of universe is the artist putting forward? This is all subject to reason. Whether we are speaking of Homer’s Iliads or the more fantastical Odyssey, Pollock’s paint-smeared canvases, or Eliot’s Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, each work in someway serves a reflection of some kind of universe. This is all subject to reason. Is the poet putting forth a universe which is fundamentally intelligible, rational, or irrational? And what is the effect of such art on society?
This is where something like Plato’s discussion about allowing the poets into society is a very compelling question. The sloppy and unrigorous academics make Plato out to be some kind Kim Jung Un telling people what haircuts they can’t or can’t have. As if that’s the kind of literal prescriptive argument Plato is making. However, that’s not Plato’s purpose or the nature of his method at all. The main point of his argument is about the nature of Gods, which ultimately defined a very specific kind of universe. Are the principles which govern the universe fundamentally rational and intelligible, or are they fundamentally irrational and unknowable? How does one’s idea about the nature of the universe fundamentally impact how an individual acts, lives and behaves on a daily basis? And what about society as a whole?How does it shape the narratives that individuals live according to, often even without fully reflecting on these questions. Art is in many ways a working out of these kinds of greater ideas, and paradoxes, especially something like drama where ideas are essentially being worked out “on the stage” of our imaginations. They are essentially thought-experiments, dramatized. What happens when an artist introduces fundamentally irrational notions into this domain? How can that shape or effect society at its most fundamental level? How HAS art shaped entire cultures and civilizations across the ages?
I know that was long, but I very much welcome a discussion on the arts and nature of Beauty on New Discourses.
Editor’s note:
“Should one individual or a whole society put other interested ahead of getting results…”
Should be “interests”
Got it, thanks.
Talking about “post-woke” is such a smart thing to do. Practically, strategically and psychologically. It’s almost as if it’s already happened. Thank you.
(And I love, love, love your Cynical Theories book – – so, so, so important). Thank you
So true. One of the things that keeps me going is the dream that before I die I might see a post-woke world emerge from the current woke nightmare.
So good! A minor proofreading note: “Immanent” is a word but I think the one you are looking for where you used it is “imminent.”
Thanks. Fixed.
Bravo! this is it. Thank you especially for keeping Beauty with the highest of virtues. “Can art, not life, make the Ideal?” is how Melville put it–a question with one right answer.
With their takeovers of the government, the mainstream news media, universities, corporations, and even public schools, I’m skeptical we’ll ever see any Enlightenment or Renaissance that will rescue us from the death of civilization the Woke are forcing us toward. I’m in my sixites. If there is ever to be a post-Woke world, I hope it starts to emerge soon so I can enjoy it for awhile before I shoot through to the other side.
Everything in the Soviet Union was once owned and under total control by the Soviets. Then their regime collapsed, and Russia reborn now has more rights and liberties than we do. No cultural hegemony or tyranny lasts forever. So many leftists today have been reduced to screeching bigots and fanatics spewing out endless bile and contradiction. The moral high ground they once occupied is no longer visible to many millions of us in the resistance. Like at least one other poster here, I really enjoyed the author’s adroitly subversive use of ‘post-woke’ in the title of what is a superbly uplifting piece, with writing that reminds me of Scruton, CS Lewis and Prager on steroids. While I doubt I’ll see the post-woke era fully bloom in my lifetime (I’m 60), I have zero doubt that I’ll always be fighting for it.
“Attempting to adjust the facts, skew the ideal, chain man’s liberty, or dethrone merit will always produce a tilted field in which justice is impossible, so attempting to do these evils in the name of justice is little more than an application of hubris, blindness, or malice… truth, beauty, liberty, and merit must be the North Star for any society that wishes to climb out of the darkness and back into the light—light that brings prosperity and flourishing to its people and to man. ” – Wow, another powerful offering.
James, you write so well , truly you possess a talent for communication and clarity. I love your reference to The Tao , the natural way of non doing. You are worthy of being called a philosopher as well as math wiz. I have seen Ken Wilber recently talk about the subject of what’s after this woke, post modern world. I think you both have a very take on the issue. He holds a very similar view.
I would argue that Wilber’s view, though similar seeming on the surface, is structurally different from Lindsay’s. Whereas Lindsay labels woke culture as “terrible” and speaks of it like a foreign enemy that must be defeated to return to order, Wilber views it as a necessary stage in cultural and personal evolution that must be embraced, seen of its various limitations, and thus transcended while including its healthy qualities (genuine empathy towards others and animals, allowance of emotional vulnerability, consideration of perspectives that differ from one’s own, recognizing the importance of social justice and collective responsibility, etc.). The attitudes they each take are almost antithetical from one another. It seems Lindsay wants to go straight to the “post” woke stage without integrating the necessary lessons one would only learn from first actually going through the woke stage. It’s a recipe for repression and ultimately suffering as far as I’m concerned.
Lovely, but naive.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/loudoun-teachers-target-parents-critical-race-theory-hacking
(RTWT)
https://christopherrufo.com/
CRT has taken hold in school districts around the country, and plenty of school boards are doubling down. You aint’ seen nothin’ yet.
Keep fighting the good fight, but don’t be too sure of victory just yet.
I in no way see this piece as naive. Rather, reeducating Westerners on the key values which we must once again recognise, champion and cherish is essential resistance against the descending darkness you rightly warn of. Also, there’s no indication that the author expects easy or early victory.
Another great article James. Although it’s heartening to see the beginnings of an informed post-woke movement, we still have a gargantuan task ahead and what’s badly needed are ways to bring this kind of rational argument to the broader population in the form of practical tools they can use to challenge wokism in their everyday lives.
Mockery triggers demons and leftists into revealing their hate, so that their power over us can be recognised, destroyed and exorcised. See Donald Trump for his excellent use of ridicule as a practical tool and tactic.
This made my day:)
Very well said. It is important to define what we stand for, not just to oppose things. An honest person reading this alongside some Woke pronouncement would understand the key issues and where their choice ought to lie. Even the “smart” ones who end up being the useful idiots of the Woke would have trouble arguing against this set of values.
Nicholas – Did Trump’s incessant ridicule work in the end though?
Enough people cared more about being embarrassed on the world stage by his boisterous rudeness, and considering him a fascist, than what actually was being accomplished, or, not accomplished while President.