WHAT'S HAPPENING IN EUROPE? - THE CULTURE WAR AROUND “WOKE”

By Gerrit Jan Bouwhuis

Introduction

In the first article I described two major changes in post-war Europe: immigration and the formation of the EU. In the second article I stated that an open democratic debate, especially on immigration, proved to be difficult. Not every position was “politically correct”. I introduced my own idea for a good democratic debate: generous in content, respectful in form.

This article is about “woke”. “Woke” is the current cultural battle in the West, if not globally. This is an extension of the previous: “woke” is “politically correct” squared. “Woke” comes from the US, but is now also conquering Europe. This article also is a reading guide. I will mention books and recommend one of them.

What is “woke”?

First the term. The term originates from the US and in progressive circles meant: be awake, be alert to disadvantages and discrimination, especially racially. So progressives wanted to be “woke.” Since the mid-1990s, the term has been used disapprovingly by conservatives to describe a cluster of progressive views that they (the conservatives) consider objectionable. The (current) progressives now say that “woke” does not exist… So the term has undergone the same reversal as the term “politically correct”: from being positively intended by progressives to being used disapprovingly by conservatives.

Then the content. “Woke” involves three elements: a certain way of thinking applied to some areas accompanied by certain practices. I cover all three, but only in their basic ideas. The world of “woke” is a huge one!

Is “woke” an important phenomenon or is it a temporary fad? In my opinion, this is essentially a cultural battle in terms of content and scope. “Woke” concerns a vision of politics and society that is not always intentionally, but for sure essentially, at odds with the basic values of the Enlightenment and of the liberal, Western democracy. Those values are: the individual; equality before the law; democratic freedoms; various beliefs; open debate; neutral science. “Woke” replaces those values with some kind of a mutual war of “tribes” and with intolerant, if not totalitarian, political practices (“woke” is Lenin revisited). In the end the achievements of the Enlightenment and the science based on it are buried. “Woke” now has a major, sometimes dominant, influence at universities, in the media and in politics. The US is leading the way, but the (Western) European countries are quickly following.

Is there discussion?

Yes, luckily. Most of the books that “founded” “woke” (before the term existed) were written from the 1990s onwards (especially in the US). This concerns names and titles such as: Judith Butler: Gender trouble (1990); Kimberlé Crenshaw: Mapping the Margins (1991); Edward Said: Orientalism (2003); Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility (2011) and others. After the breakthrough of “woke” the last ten years, the number of critical books is growing rapidly. Some titles. In English: Pluckrose and Lindsay: Cynical critical theories (2020); Lukianoff and Haidt: The coddling of the American mind (2018); Saad: The parasitic mind (2020); Murray: The madness of crowds (2020); McWhorter: Woke Racism (2021); Neiman: Left is Not Woke (2023). In German: Marguier et al.: Die Wokeness-Illusion (2023); Köpf/Ramadani: Woke (2023); Schröter: Der neue Kulturkampf (the new cultural battle) (2024); In French: Braunstein: La religion woke (2022); Mahoudeau: La panique woke (2022); Bussigny: les nouveaux inquisiteurs (2023); In Dutch: De Jong: Wokeland (2022); De Wever: Over (about) woke (2023); Van den Berg: Het spook (ghost) of woke (2023). Many others. A lot of good books.

I recommend Pluckrose and Lindsay (Cynical critical theories, 2020): systematic, concrete, clear. I use a lot of information from this book.

The father and mother of “woke”

One can say (in my imagination) that “Woke” has a “father” and a “mother” (however, these concepts are contraband in “wokeland”). The “father” is philosophical postmodernism. That is the “woke” way of thinking. That way of thinking is the most important. That's the basics. The mother is neo-Marxism.

First the father. Postmodern philosophy was invented by the French: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and others. Seventies and eighties. This philosophy has two central tenets: first, a radical skepticism regarding the possibility of objective knowledge and universal truths. Everything is a “cultural construct”. They also rejected all value systems (“metanarratives”), such as Enlightenment, Christianity, Marxism. This is the postmodern principle of knowledge: there is no objective knowledge and truth. Second, the belief that society is a system of power and hierarchy that determines how you think and act. Therefore the individual is not autonomous and not free. You are trapped in the system, you are a victim. This is the postmodern political principle. This philosophy is completely cynical: meaning is not possible. That’s where we were around 1990.

With this philosophy, postmodernism could not gain political influence, because there is nothing left. Everything has been “deconstructed” and a void remained. But then two “mutations” came along (Pluckrose and Lindsay who use this word, compare this to a virus that mutates into harmful variants).

The first mutation (from the 1990s onwards) was that progressive political activists (neo-Marxists), coming from the “Frankfurter School”, adopted postmodern ideas: everything a “social construct”; society as a system of power and hierarchy. But they took two pieces of luggage with them: the will to change the world and the Marxist way of thinking of absolute perpetrators (capitalists) versus absolute victims (proletarians). And thus an activist group of philosophical, social and political scientists focused on political action and thinking in terms of (absolute; all of them) perpetrators versus victims, emerged. However, the Marxist duality of perpetrators/victims was now applied to: white versus colored; West versus East/South; man versus woman; hetero versus LGBTQ+. This mutation is crucial to understand “woke”: identity groups of guilty and victims, of bad and good. Some call this: “cultural marxism”.

The second mutation (from the 2010s onwards) concerned the design of the action. With a variation on Descartes ("I think, therefore I am"), the starting point of postmodern social science became: “I am a victim, therefore I am”. Society is a social construct of power and hierarchy. The power lay with the Western, white (hetero) men. Victims are everyone else: the colonized peoples, the non-whites, women, LGBTQ+. And perpetratorship and victimhood are absolute categories that apply to the entire group. Political goal of science is the liberation of the oppressed. This can be done by replacing the language and knowledge (books and resources) of Western white men with knowledge and language of those oppressed groups. And that is what started to be done on a large scale in the social sciences. That's called “Social Justice Scholarship”. It has nothing to do with science anymore. It's about political activism.

So much for the father. The mother has already been mentioned: the Marxist way of thinking of absolute perpetrators versus absolute victims involved in a struggle of revolution and liberation: elimination of injustice, gaining the paradise. Yes, the world is not perfect; there is injustice, sometimes great injustice. For passionate idealists the temptation of powerful utopias, such as Marxism, is great. And so it happened: the “postmodern” father impregnated the “Marxist mother” who yearned for the eradication of injustice and thus begot the child “Woke”, an intellectually heavily handicapped newborn. 100 years ago the pitfall of utopias led to devastating experiments**. 

With “woke” this happens again.

The areas of “woke”

 The areas concerned are dominant primarily in two fields: a) colonial history and the relationship between races/peoples and b) the field of sexuality. In the universities it is about the “humanities”: philosophy, history, sociology, psychology and all kinds of colonial and gender studies.

An extensive project of decolonization started. This is a project of rewriting history. Increasing insight into history (new facts) is of course fine. But that's not what happens. It is not about verifying new facts; “white” history is a lie; it is about experiences of victims; only these experiences are true; science is politics. And so: curricula are rewritten; statues of old white man are deleted (Voltaire, Hume, Jefferson; racists); books are burned; for slavery is apologized and paid (only for the Atlantic slavery of course!)

The number of examples is long. In the Netherlands, the most visible is the abolition of “Black Pete”, the servant of Santa Clause. Santa Clause and Black Pete are fictional characters in a yearly Dutch children's folkloric tradition. Racism was seen in this black fictional character. Nobody in the Netherlands had that association. The fictional figure Black Pete had as little to do with the black race as the red of the red traffic light with the red of the political left or the red of love. But a small action group successfully campaigned against “Black Pete”. And Black Pete was replaced by “Soot Wipe Pete”. Complete nonsense and a sad example of a lack of critical capacity among the entire media elite. ***

In the field of sexuality, the situation is maybe even more insane. In line with the postmodern idea that all reality is a “social construct” the woke position is that biological differences are totally irrelevant. The only reality has to be the own feeling about sexuality. It should also be possible for the law to determine one’s sexuality. It also leads to doing away with words such as man, woman, mother, father. Women are “bodies with a vagina” or “people with a capacity for pregnancy”. A mother is “the parent from which the child is born”.

The practices of “woke”

The practices include four elements:  a) the aforementioned culture of victimhood; this culture is huge: everywhere is seen (systemic) racism (although no law is discriminating); typical aspect of this is the call for “safe spaces”: no exposure to felt verbal harassment; quick feeling of being insulted of in my opinion highly narcistic characters b) the thinking in identitarian groups; the school in the US that segregates by race again: the black child must be aware of racial identity; c) the practice of science as activism; d) exclusion: other views may not be admitted: professors who are dismissed or not allowed to speak; the writer Rowling who was canceled because she did not want to deny biological sexes, and so forth.  

Conclusion

And there we are. I want to say: discrimination has to be fought; and a more complete picture of history is ok. Defenders of “woke” say that this is what happens (“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” – the dress of “woke” -) and that for the rest the concept “woke” is nonsense.  They are wrong. They don’t see the basic principles. A new ideology is spreading that wants to destroy Western achievements: not the individual, but the identitarian group; no tolerance and openness, but exclusion of other views; no growth into adulthood, but a narcistic cult of victimhood; no verifiable science, but activism; no cohesion but tribal conflict. This new ideology is racist, intolerant and totalitarian (1917 repeated****). A viral epidemic of stupidity says the Dutch philosophical writer Van den Berg. Let the West wake up!

What explains the success of “woke”? I have to say: I don’t know. The loss of meaning frameworks, such as Christianity, but the continued need for them? Perhaps. The genuine indignation about injustice and especially the frustration about having suffered it for centuries, a bill that is presented? Possibly. The resulting emptiness, feelings of powerlessness and frustration... and then the lure of radical utopias? Maybe. A challenge to think about further.

Two last thoughts. Firstly: a society in balance, open, tolerant, no resentment; no anger, no culture of victimhood, how incredibly difficult that turns out to be!! Second, what determines history, ideas (Hegel) or economic conditions (Marx)? Interesting question. I'll stick with the former.

In the next article I will take a closer look at the EU that has been built up since the 1950s.

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*About the author: Gerrit Jan Bouwhuis (1948) was advisor to the Minister of Finance in the Netherlands. After his retirement he made study trips to Africa and Eastern Europe. Since 2018, he has worked as an international election observer in Ukraine, Iraq and Turkey.

** Editor’s Note: Joseph Stalin took power in the Soviet Union in 1924.

*** Editor’s Note: In the same vein, Noddy’s golliwog friends have been omitted from that children’s book in the United Kingdom.

**** Editor’s Note: The Russian Revolution (two actually, with the “October Revolution” placing the Bolsheviks in power).