James Lindsay Goes to Oxford

Imagine my surprise. Late last summer, I got an email from the Oxford Union formally inviting me to debate the proposition “This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far.” Then, a month or so after I accepted, while on a flight across the country to Southern California, I happened to stumble upon the Oxford Union debate schedule page a few hours after it was posted only to discover that the house had placed me in the opposition to the proposition. That is, Oxford Union had deemed that I do not believe Woke culture has gone too far. I was to be up against Toby Young, Konstantin Kisin, and Charlie Kirk, which was a considerable shock. I had no idea who the people on my side were.

I was also pretty excited because it was an opportunity of a lifetime for me. I was going to get to take something like the Grievance Studies Affair to Oxford, live and in person, as myself.

After sitting on this news for a few weeks, assuming the Oxford Union would realize its mistake and cancel me, seeing as the proposition side of the debate was already full, the decisive need to make travel arrangements loomed, so I emailed the Oxford Union to point out their error. Of course, I also made it clear I was willing and able to accept the side of the debate to which I had been assigned. The Oxford Union replied fairly promptly, saying, “We did not know that Dr Lindsay wanted to speak on the proposition side of the debate. However, at this point, the proposition side is full. Is there any chance Dr Lindsay can speak on the opposition side?” Obviously, I eagerly insisted that I could and would.

A few weeks later, I was off to London (where, as many people saw, I visited Karl Marx’s grave), and then on to Oxford from there. Charlie, embroiled in Arizona politics and its interminable election, unfortunately couldn’t make it. I wondered if that would result in my being moved to the proposition side, for which I hadn’t prepared, and I angled to be allowed to argue both sides.

When I arrived at the reception at the Union that evening, I met the people on both sides of the debate and was glad to see that everyone got along very well. Nobody seemed to be able to account for how I ended up on the wrong side of the debate, but nearly everyone involved deemed it suspicious and confusing. An interesting detail that surfaced was that apparently several appropriate professors were invited to be on the opposition (pro-Woke) side of the debate and all refused to participate in such a thing. Nevertheless, among those of us who did show up, the atmosphere through the reception and dinner was cordial and friendly. We were then informed at the end of dinner that we’d go do photographs and then proceed to the hall for the debate where a half hour would be spent on in-house business, which seemed to have people quite excited.

That was incorrect. The sitting president of the Oxford Union was ousted that night in parliamentary warfare, and it ended up taking over two and a half hours, unfortunately cutting down the audience for the debate from what appeared to have been well over 500 people to some 150 who were able to stay (which began at nearly 11:00 pm, scheduled for 8:30—rivaling airlines in bad weather). This is what I and several other speakers referred to at the beginning of our remarks that evening.

I don’t intend to give a blow-by-blow summary of the debate. I encourage people to watch my part and the others for that (four speakers argued for ten minutes each, alternating sides). Instead, I want to summarize my argument and what I was doing with it and draw out a couple of important other points. My argument was simple: taken on its own terms, “Woke culture” has not gone too far because it cannot go too far.

I opened my arguments, as you can see, by impugning the Oxford Union itself, indicating that it proves itself not Woke by having the debate at all, inviting characters such as myself and the other opposition and allowing us to speak against Woke culture, and issuing a dress code of black tie, which I referred to as “colonizer formalwear” that prohibits members of marginalized groups from bringing their full authentic selves to the debate. I insisted that if Woke culture hasn’t even penetrated into the Oxford Union, then it clearly hasn’t gone far enough because it hasn’t even made it to such an important place. Though partly tongue-in-cheek, the argument is legitimate under the Woke doctrine of epistemic oppression, and it was fun to bring a little struggle-session flavor to the Oxford Union.

As a note of aside, the audience at Oxford Union debates is allowed to interrupt the speaker for a “point of information,” which can be heard repeatedly throughout the various arguments. The speaker has the option to accept or reject this request at his own discretion. I rejected all such requests, insisting that to interrupt a speaker who is arguing on behalf of Social Justice is to do epistemic harm to those who depend upon the Woke push for Social Justice. Nevertheless, many Union members proved my point about Woke culture having not entered into their own house by interrupting me throughout the rest of my remarks. People watching the video should not mistake me answering “No!” to these requests for shutting down hecklers, though. There were no hecklers in the Oxford Union, and I get the sincere impression they would not have been tolerated in the slightest (this is also proof the Union hasn’t allowed Woke Culture in because it sets the terms of debate and protest in ways that limit forms of expression suited to strategic resistance).

After that, I began my case with an argument that Woke culture has not gone far enough because its stated objectives aren’t being realized and, in some cases, aren’t even being attempted. To do this, first, I defined “Woke” as being what is meant, or what has been derived from, Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness. To have been “conscientized” to the “dehumanizing forms” (systemic racism, sexism, cisheteronormativity, ableism, classism, etc.) that shape our social realities, along with their “historical” causes and to the “dehumanizing modes” of engaging ideas and each other is the first part of what it means to be Woke. The second, and crucial part, is that one also must be an activist that, in Freire’s words, denounces the existing world critically so that the possibility of a utopian world is simultaneously announced.

I built upon this argument by saying this implies that Woke ideology seeks “Social Justice,” which I first argued extends Karl Marx’s definition of true Communism as “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement” to include social and cultural capital as well. I also called Karl Marx a “damned conservative” and backed it up by saying he ignored those aspects of social and cultural capital he, himself, benefited from as a privileged white, Eurocentric male. Wokeness, in other words, is the pursuit of Karl Marx’s vision of the “positive transcendence of” all forms of “private property,” or bourgeois property, such as capital, whiteness, and normalcy, under the brand name “Social Justice.”

I then pointed out that Social Justice is the “consummation” of “social equity,” which we usually just call equity: an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal. I said that this consummation of social equity into social justice is identical to how Karl Marx envisioned socialism consummating itself into Communism, roughly by becoming the universal and spontaneous state of affairs in the remade world, as opposed to something that has to be administered.

To better understand equity, I invoked Ibram Kendi’s idea that it follows from positive discrimination that “undoes” the discrimination of the past and present. Kendi argued unambiguously in his runaway bestseller How to Be an Antiracist that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” “the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” and “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” Obviously, we aren’t taking this seriously, I said, because the Supreme Court is currently walking back Harvard and perhaps UNC’s antiracist discrimination programs for equity, proving Woke culture hasn’t gone too far because we’re not even pursuing its first tangible step, equity, in a meaningful way.

Continuing with Kendi, I pointed out further that we haven’t followed his instructions to erect a “Department of Antiracism” through an “Antiracist Constitutional Amendment” in the United States. Since that hypothetical amendment would empower that hypothetical (DOA) bureaucracy—filled only with “experts” on racism, according to Kendi—with full authority and punitive power over all local, state, and federal public policy, public officials, private entities, and their officials to ensure racist ideas and racial inequities don’t surface or are changed, I likened his proposal to a DOA: dictatorship of the antiracists, in perfect parallel to Marx’s (and Lenin’s) dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the only way toward Communist or Woke (Social) Justice, depending on which century and country we’re working in. Since we’re not doing that, we’re not taking meaningful political steps toward equity, which is only a first step toward Social Justice, and thus Woke culture hasn’t yet gone far enough, never mind “too far.”

That Woke Marxism—as we can now unambiguously identify it—hasn’t gone too far yet isn’t just a state of social and political circumstance, however. I next argued that on its own terms and by its own descriptions of itself, it cannot go too far. Obviously, if it cannot go too far, it has not yet gone too far, so this is an airtight argument for the opposition I was representing. How did I make it?

First, I went back to the father of Woke Marxism, Paulo Freire, who insisted that to be authentic, the (cultural) revolution his method of Woke conscientization is employed to produce “must be perpetual.” If it stops, it becomes a new status quo, Freire tells us, “bureaucratic” (like Kendi’s DOA), “sclerotic,” “necrophiliac,” and necessarily right-wing. Freire says that when the revolution proceeds, the need for critical consciousness therefore increases rather than ending. In other words, if the “culture” of Woke Marxism seems to achieve its goals, the response is a deepening of conscientization, which is to say more and deeper Woke culture. That means Woke Marxism cannot go too far according to its own terms.

This is supported, I explained, in the practice of Queer Theory specifically. Paraphrasing from David Halperin in his book Saint Foucault, I point out that “queer” in Queer Theory means a resistance against all norms and societal expectations, including any new ones created by Queer Theory itself. It is, he says, “an identity without an essence,” an “empty placeholder for an identity that is still in progress” and an “identity in a state of becoming.” This seems both obvious (if you know anything about Queer Theory) and ridiculous (whether you know anything about it or not), so it’s worth quoting Halperin at some length on the point in a way I could not do in the debate.

The objection that queer culture as it actually exists, far from producing practices of freedom, has simply promoted new forms of discipline and constructed even more insidious procedures of normalization? After all, it has become de rigueur among lesbians and gay men to confront straight society by deploying just so much queemess, just the right, premeasured dose of deviance and nonconformity: there is now a right way to be queer, to be radical, to be “in your face,” to invert the norms of straight society, and well-socialized lesbians and gay men spend a lot of time—and, more tellingly, money—acquiring the requisite T-shirts, muscles, haircuts, tattoos, dietary habits, body piercings, and so forth. Isn’t the marketing of queer identity a form of normalization-by-commodification? How can queer modes of consumption count as resistant cultural practices, as self-transformative ethical work, without trivializing the very notion of political resistance and compromising its oppositional function? Doesn’t queer commodification reduce politics to a consumerist lifestyle? Foucault’s response to that possibility was to refuse to identify any actually existing social group as a political vanguard and, instead, to search constantly for new practices, techniques, and modes of analysis that might, in the current historical situation, enlarge the possibilities for ongoing personal and political transformation. Queer politics may, by now, have outlived its political usefulness, but if its efficacy and its productive political life can indeed still be renewed and extended, the first step in this procedure will be to try and preserve the function of queer identity as an empty placeholder for an identity that is still in progress and has as yet to be fully realized, to conceptualize queer identity as an identity in a state of becoming rather than as the referent for an actually existing form of life. Queer politics, if it is to remain queer, needs to be able to perform the function of emptying queerness of its referentiality or positivity, guarding against its tendency to concrete embodiment, and thereby preserving queerness as a resistant relation rather than as an oppositional substance. (pp. 112–113)

Thus, I insist, the aspect of Woke Marxism called “Queer Theory” (and its culture of opposition to everything) cannot possibly go too far. If it stops, it creates something that must now be opposed, just like what Freire was explaining regarding society and the production of a new, imposed status quo unless the revolution is permanent. The only conclusion we can draw is that “Woke culture” cannot go too far, therefore it has not gone too far, at which point any mathematical mind would conclude that I had completely demonstrated my point. If we accept the foundational premises of Woke culture as indicative of what Woke culture means, then on its own terms, it cannot have gone too far and, worse, cannot go too far. Society itself must perpetually be an “identity that is in a state of becoming.”

To wrap up, I indicated that Freirean “annunciation by denunciation” alongside this tendency implies that to achieve Social Justice—to consummate Woke Marxism—the existing society has to be denounced and destroyed completely (as would whatever followed it, perpetually). Our society, though hanging on by a mere thread at the moment, has not been destroyed completely and replaced by an allegedly liminal administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal. Therefore, because our society still stands, even if only barely, Woke culture has not gone too far.

To wrap up, two speakers followed me, and each bears making one remark upon. First, Konstantin Kisin, for the proposition, began by pointing out that everything I had just said was the reason to agree with the proposition and believe that however far Woke culture has gone already, it’s already definitely too far. I had sincerely hoped he would do that (and had advised Charlie, if he was slated to follow me, to do exactly that and steal the debate from my otherwise ironclad argument), so that was great. And the proposition won (that is, my side, the Woke side, lost), and that’s as it should be. Then, Benjamin Butterworth, for the last argument and the opposition, got up and more or less repeated my argument (which Konstantin had just called a giant loser), albeit unironically: Woke culture cannot have gone too far because it cannot go too far.

In all, great fun was had by everyone, the debate was a resounding success, I deployed the argument I wanted to deploy, and the correct side of the debate won. It was quite the evening!

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