The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 34
Society depends upon the people in it being able to rely upon expectations about how it and the other people in it will function. This requires a sense of what is and isn’t reasonable. Some of this is, as the Woke contend, socially constructed, perhaps even partially arbitrary and up for debate. Much of it isn’t. Wokeness doesn’t agree, however. By having adopted a strict adherence to Critical Theory and the social constructivism of postmodernism, Wokeness rejects the entire idea that there is any such thing as a reasonable person or standard. In place of a sense of what is and isn’t reasonable, the Woke ideology sees only one thing, its sole obsession: power. This is a catastrophe for society and the laws upon which a functioning society depends. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to learn about the long history of unreason in Wokeness and even its all-out rejection of the notion that anyone or any position at all can be reasonable in any meaningful sense.
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5 comments
It sounds like wokeism is similar to branches of Sophism than eventually helped destroy the Hellenistic world, or threw it into reaction. Historian Henry Bamford Parkes wrote about it in ‘Gods and Men: the origins of Western Culture.’
Thanks
Um. If no one is reasonable then that means that Woke is also not reasonable and therefore not worthy of consideration.
Kant is like AIDS. He discredited the objectivity of reason, making our culture vulnerable to any opportunistic subjectivism, from Hegel through the postmodern woke.
My experience with the woke is that beyond doubt they believe in reasonable people. Just as long as reasonable people are themselves, or people like themselves, who have shown they have the right credentials to be ‘trusted’ with such an adjective.
They’re able to recognise the notion of reasonability, and more than happy to bandy terms about like reason and logic, when they can flaunt their own moral-intellectual superiority and sneer at others for their supposed lack of ‘subtlety’ and ‘nuance’. It only becomes problematic to them when it’s being invoked by those weird, icky nuisances: so-called ‘debate nerds’, who are in their eyes either too conservative, too ugly, too socially ungraceful, and even too autistic to have earned the right to use it (see how they talk about Matt Bruenig for a recent example).
But I think you’re right to link this with their obsession with power. While I’d contend they believe in the existence of reasonability, it’s more about what they get out of it than caring a jot about objectivity or elevating discourse. They’re more concerned about being the ones who end up mediating its use.