What I’d like to attempt with this presentation is to give an overview of Wokeism and some of its history nested inside a set of metaphors drawn from the Christian scriptures, like those sets of nested Russian dolls. I’ll be using insights from, Rene Girard, Jordan Peterson, James Lindsey, Gil Bailie and Joseph Pearce.
As an initial working definition, you could say that Wokeism is ‘victim farming’. It is the cultivation of various species under the genus of ‘victim’, based on race, sex, chubbiness, disabilities, skin colour, etc., etc. Once the fruits of Wokism have been harvested it is hoped, by the practitioners of Wokeism, that they can be processed into a final product labelled ‘Social Justice’.
Through Joseph, Jesus is part of the house and lineage of King David. Similarly, ‘Wokeism’ is part of the house and lineage of a 1960’s philosophy called ‘post-modernism’. A bit of the genealogy of ‘post-modernism’ can help in understanding the motivation and behaviour of its ‘woke’ offspring.
In the early 20th century there was a visceral belief in human progress. This philosophy of ‘progress’ was based on Evolution, the belief that everything is getting progressively better. So, anything that stands in the way of progress and efficiency is bad. The past is the culprit. Old is bad. New is good. Its slogan was that “Everyday and in every way, things are getting better and better.” G.K. Chesterton called this outlook “the whole philosophy of the Fall of Man.” Commenting on Chesterton’s take on the gospel of progress Joseph Pearce notes that for the secular believers,
Progress is unstoppable; it is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. It has all the attributes of the divine. It is inexorable, indestructible, and of course benign. It is not only an all-powerful god, but a good god.
At this juncture, we should confess that the god of progress is much more mysterious than the God of the Christians. As a blind mechanical force, it has no personality, yet it guides everything with a mystically benign hand. It has no will but its will is always done.
But this sort of “progress” does not really exist; it is nothing but the superstitious fantasy of [political] “progressives.” It is the mother of deception as its spouse is the father of lies.
So, there is a spiritual substrate to Wokeism.
Fast forward to the 1960’s. The First and Second World Wars had shaken Europe’s confidence in the god of progress. That god had allowed both the rise of fascism as well as the rise of communism. He had presided over Hiroshima as well as the Holocaust. The scale of the horrors and suffering was beyond comprehension. The 1960’s was the perfect storm of disillusionment with political narratives of all stripes. Even confidence in the redemptive power of science was badly bruised. After all it was science that had been used to develop the atomic bomb and interestingly the database technology that we use today for our online banking was developed and beta tested by managing the operations at the Auschwitz death camp. Science has no moral compass.
In a Christian sense all the political denominations, both left and right, that worshiped at the altar of the god of ‘Progress’ had been preaching their own versions of what amounted to be a false gospel. For when the fullness of time had arrived for that gospel to deliver its promised salvation, it could only bring forth death and despair.
Postmodernism was a reaction to this existential crisis. If a crime has been committed there is a forensic analysis of the crime scene to determine the truth of what happened, but the forensic analysist must be an outside and neutral observer. But in this case since all of the powers that be were implicated in the devastation, where do you find that required place of distance and neutrality? It is akin to the problem that if we are all tainted by original sin how can we alone determine what the truth is?
The French philosopher of language, Jacques Derrida, had developed a technique for analysing the nature and structure of narratives. He started this in response to the language of French politics where a bureaucrat would present, what we would call today a ‘word salad’ and then would say in conclusion “therefore we are raising your taxes” or some such pronouncement. Intuitively you would sense that this was just an exercise in the application of power where someone attempts to “baffle you with bullshit” to camouflage that power and ‘gaslight’ you at the same time, with the implication that you are not sophisticated enough to grasp the meaning of their “word salad”. Derrida called his analytical technique for reverse engineering word-salads, “deconstruction”.
In response to the disillusionment with the current crop pf political narratives, Derrida’s contemporary, the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard, argued that what he called “meta-narratives” which are similar to a worldview—something that gives meaning to life and the individual events that take place in life, had to be treated with suspicion. After Lyotard’s analysis postmodern persons generally do not accept any overarching story that gives meaning to all of life. Instead, they focus on small, individual narratives that give meaning to their own lives. A metanarrative speaks of absolute, universal truth. An individual narrative speaks of what is “true for me” and “gives meaning to my life.” Postmodern thinking rejects metanarratives because it rejects universal truth. The postmodern view is that a single narrative giving meaning to all lives is an absolute impossibility.
Some of the things that went on in the 20th century were beyond the moral categories of good and bad and veered into the spiritual category of evil. Was post modernism initially an attempt, however secular, to exorcise that demon that had possessed the modern world? Even if post modernism was partially successful at this disinfection, Jesus warns that if all you do is clean house and nothing else, “then that demon can return and bring with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” Matthew 12:45. Is Wokeism one of that group of seven?
I did some kitchen renovations for my daughter. Part of those renovations was to ‘deconstruct’ a couple of walls and part of that process was to take a sledgehammer to those walls. I could still use some of the lumber and trim, so it wasn’t to completely “destroy” everything. I let my grandson do the sledge hammering. He was just elated. It reminded me of an episode of the cartoon “The Simpsons” where Bart goes to an amusement park and rides the roller coaster. He squeals, in delight, “I could do this forever!”
Combining Derrida and Lyotard, the ‘deconstruction’ of ‘metanarratives’ became the philosophical sport of the 1970’s and 80’s. Whether political, religious, or moral any ‘narrative’ became fair game. The postmodern demolition derby team became fixated on wielding their semantic sledgehammers looking for structures of power hidden inside the walls of the text. Given the seriousness of the mid-century existential crisis, for Jordan Peterson, the postmodern philosophers spent too much time just joy riding on the “Dragon of Deconstruction” rollercoaster. For him, the opportunity to come to terms with the post WWII situation was squandered.
Even though Marxism was one of the metanarratives that Chief Inspector Derrida had under his looking glass, in the 1970’s Marxism impregnated post modernism. The Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse oversaw this exercise in political animal husbandry. For him Marxist theory was the ultimate form of forensic knowledge and the only tool needed to solve the modern existential crisis. He said that he received this inside information as a result of him returning to the Garden of Eden and taking a second bite out of the apple! There were now two flavours of postmodernism the original ‘academic postmodernism’ and the new kid on the block, ‘vulgar postmodernism’, the mother of Wokeism.
One way to conceptualize Marcuse’s approach is to think of worldviews as computer operating systems, for example Windows and Apple IOS. For him the OS based on the Judaeo Christian / Natural Law worldview was too ‘buggy’ to run any social programs. The Marxist OS was a superior operating system, even though when it was used to run the ‘economic communism’ program it ended up as an absolute disaster crashing the whole system. Marcuse’s newly acquired rarefied knowledge told him that the culturally oriented Feminist, Queer, Intersectional, Critical Race, etc. programs would run just fine, though.
What is the bait that is used to reel people in to adopting this new operating system? It is compassion. Consider this point made by Rene Girard:
“The Kingdom of God… is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on earth; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.” Mark 4: 30-32
Prior to Jesus the default social sentiment was with the powerful person, in a situation. It was the warrior or statesmen that subdued the enemy that was haled as the hero, the one to emulate. There was very little concern or compassion for any victims, they were just seen as the currency that had to be spent to purchase the greatness of the hero. Jesus comes along and in Christianity, God himself becomes the innocent victim.
That tiny mustard seed gets planted on Golgotha. In 2000 years, it has grown into a mighty tree where the Western social imaginary now defaults to concern for the victim. All the modern and post-modern secular humanist flavoured ideologies nest in this tree because they are all based on compassion for the victim de-jure (working class, women, homosexuals, transsexuals, blacks, etc., etc.). The devil has stolen Christ’s ‘intellectual property’ and is pawning off ‘compassion’ as his own schtick! Which is the methodology of the ‘Anti-Christ’, marketing himself as being more Christlike than Christ!
There is a bit of a ‘bait and switch’ going on with an appeal to compassion. We are conditioned to assume that if someone is being compassionate, they are therefore being morally good. It’s our “Achilles Heel” as Christians. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor” and Karl Marx says, “Blessed are the poor (the proletariat)”, the words sound the same, but the meaning is totally different. This is one of the characteristics of Wokeism. They will use our vocabulary but not our dictionary. The faint smell of deceit lingers around the woke use of language.
As per Joseph Pearce’s point about progressivism, “It is the mother of deception as its spouse is the father of lies”, part of Jesus’ injunction to us to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” is to be awake to the trap of terminology. Consider the word ‘theory’ as in, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Theory, and Queer Theory. We tend to think of the word ‘theory’ as a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena. In the woke dictionary the meaning of ‘theory’ is closer to what we would call ‘gospel’, a message in words that are the intelligent communication of God's truth.
‘Critical Race Theory’ or the more aptly named ‘The Critical Race Gospel’ states that, “race is a political construction that was invented by white people to give themselves power while excluding all other races from it, and racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society, present in all interactions, institutions, and phenomena, and effectively permanent in society.” This is hardly a ‘tentative’ insight. It is a definitive statement of faith that, for the woke, ‘we live and move and have our being in the fishbowl of race’.
Interestingly, the text that great grandaddy of cultural Marxism (wokeism) Karl Marx penned, “The Communist Manifesto” was originally entitled “The Communist Confession of Faith”. For James Lindsey, wokeism is a type of gnostic faith where the initiated elite possess the ‘secret knowledge’ which will provide the alchemical solutions that society needs in order to progress towards its collective secular salvation. You see this with Marcuse’s quest for him to be possessed by the secret occult knowledge, facilitated by his second bite of the apple. The woke are not interested in dialogue with people who are running their programs on the Judeo/Christian operating system. The woke are taking their cues from Marx’s version of 2 Corinthians 6:17, “Therefore, come out from among them and be ye separate, saith Karl; do not touch any unclean bourgeois thing.”
In 1985 the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire used explicitly Christian imagery in his description of becoming woke. He said that to become woke one needs an “Easter” experience. One must die to the bourgeois mindset and be resurrected into the new life of the spirit of Marxism. At this point one will “awaken” to the truth. Paraphrasing Paulo, Therefore, if any man be in Marx, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. The “woke” are the zealots of this new gnostic faith.
How do the “woke” evangelize? My daughter was compelled to take “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” training at work. Which again uses our vocabulary but their dictionary. The trainers started off by telling a story where someone is apparently marginalized by their race and then asked the participants to think about a similar story from their own experience. Most people in the class came to the point where they would at least concede that the trainer’s story had a point, of sorts. This was the whole point of the exercise to get you to the point where you would concede that the trainer had a point. At this point the hook had been set. You can now be played and eventually reeled into their re-education pond. The woke evangelize by what could be called “ideological grooming”. This form of grooming combined with an appeal to “compassion” is a powerful evangelical methodology.
The churches hold Parish missions and Vacation Bible Schools while the woke have government, industry and education mandating compulsory Diversity training and public libraries hosting drag queen story hours. This makes our social institutions a venue for equal opportunity “grooming” for both the old and the young alike. Marxist theorists like Marcuse and Freire have been busy harnessing the mechanisms of state, business and more and more even the churches, in their attempts to colonize our culture for Karl. The churches cannot have catechism classes in the schools but the woke can have compelled curriculum.
Hopefully the analysis, in this presentation, can give us some insights into the woke among us. Recalling the kitchen renovation story, earlier in this talk. The woke are attempting a complete renovation of society. Using their skills of deconstruction, they only want to junk the structures of our society for parts, for example, the family unit, sexual complementarity, the Rule of Law, our language, the economic order, and the Christian churches. This extends to even to our ontological structures like womanhood, for instance. We are told that we now cannot distinguish Mr. Potato Head from Mrs. Potato Head, since all appendages are swapable. After the orgy of deconstruction, the woke can have a work bee social to see what salvageable pieces they can dig out of the rubble. It is not a divine renovation that they are undertaking but demonic renovation. “Woe be unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD.”, Jeremiah 23:1
In the Bible evil has two personifications, the Devil and Satan. The Devil, or diabolos, is known as the sower of discord, the one who scatters. He is the guy who runs the “Dragon of Deconstruction” roller coaster. He is in the crisis creating business. Once a crisis gets sparking on all cylinders Satan, the accuser, steps up to the plate. In the woke context Satan will say, “(___Name (Bill, Fred, John or whomever)____), your implicit/explicit bias/privilege/phobia/bigotry/use of language (*check all that apply) is the direct cause of the current crisis and the wages of your woke sins are social and/or financial death. Therefore, it is better that you should be cancelled than the body politic should suffer!” This is the real “schtick” of the evil one, not the bogus “compassion” that was used to bait the hook. For the type of work that the Devil and Satan do any ‘ism’ that has a totalitarian instinct is an equal opportunity employer. Wokeism can thrive in the soils of modern Marxism and those of the newer, newer kids on the block, the many faces of Globalism.
With their totalitarian mindset and now running all their application software on their new operating system the Woke have no empathy for us, they only have sympathy for the devil. Our protests and requests for dialogue go nowhere. They have ears but hear not and eyes but see not. In reality they are hell bent on pursuing cancel culture (via deconstruction) at all costs and have no interest in pursuing, as just noted, their falsely advertised ‘compassion’. A lot of the woke goings on go beyond the moral categories of good and bad and veer into the spiritual category of evil, like the wars of the 20th century which were the triggering events for postmodernism. There are both political and spiritual front lines in this current battle. In a very real sense, we are being thrust into a situation of spiritual warfare and we are the ones that need to be “woke” to this reality. “So, wake up, and strengthen what you still have before it dies completely.”, Revelation, 3:2
Blog photo credit - "Tagging Walls for Demolition", OrganPinter, flickr.
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