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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   16321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman

For our benefit, please provide an example of where you think the word "woke" was used as a "nebulous boogeyman" and explain how you think that nebulousness reflected an "increase" from previous use cases.

Because it seems to me that "define woke" is a question posed (mostly by trolls) all the time around here. I've never actually seen this community struggle, even a tiny bit, with what is or is not "woke."

What is woke?

"Woke" is a convenient handle for left wing identitarianism, broadly construed. It is often in tension with left wing materialism, so e.g. Marxists are often anti-woke leftists.

This can be confusing because "woke" is predominantly what was once called "cultural Marxism" (e.g.)--before that phrase got memory-holed into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory." Cultural Marxism, in turn, is the application of "critical theory" and redistributionist tendencies to "social capital" instead of monetary capital. This is one reason Marxists are often at odds with wokists; Marxism is a modernist and materialist philosophy, while wokism is postmodern and sociological. Classical Marxists will tell you that cultural Marxism is not even Marxism at all... but they still typically vote for the same people and policies.

One way in which "woke" may be somewhat evolved beyond cultural Marxism is that it seems to have incorporated a decentralized ethos impossible prior to the advent of social media; what counts as "woke" today can change rapidly depending on what is trending and who is getting cancelled. While "purity spirals" are evidenced in e.g. classical Marxist circles, "woke" (plus tech) seems to take this to unprecedented levels.

Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?

How would you define "socially conscious?" I am definitely conscious of the social issues that consume wokist thought, and yet it would clearly be a mistake to identify me as "woke," because I am not a left wing identitarian. Most people who are obsessed with issues of race or gender, and who regard those differences as central to all political questions, are left wing identitarians, but some are right wing identitarians, and those are not "woke" either--that's the "alt right"--or, better, the "identitarian right."

I wouldn't mind too terribly if the word "woke" went away, but in my experience the only people who would benefit from having it go away, and who really want it to go away, are left wing identitarians, and "left wing identitarian" is admittedly something of a mouthful.

I appreciate your thoughtful response. As others have mentioned, a similar, but less pointed question came up last week, and several of the responses seemed to be incredibly open ended, as these discussions tend to go, (ex communism is when the government does stuff I don't particularly care for). That is my primary intention for asking this question more directly. To answer your question of some instances of this occurring previously here, here are a few quotes from last week's thread:

Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration. His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening. Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?

Here is the next one:

Broadly the biggest issue with wokeness is the introduction of thought terminating cliches that only require self-invocation to exercise, as opposed to collective consensus. Terms have been assigned significant valence without need for review, and at peak wokeness it was necessary to grovel in advance at the mere prospect of a new term being theoretically introduced at an unspecified future date, leading to pre-emptive self-abasement and outgroup preference signaling to convey ideological purity. The keystone logic allowing this subversion of logical order is the attribution of all disparate outcomes to external factors, placing the burden of responsibility on others who are presumed able to exercise power. This incentivizes weakening of self to force others to exercise their power and resources for yourself, and this is the defining presentation of wokeness.

One poster even had the self-awareness to state the following:

I fear I am succumbing to a temptation to label anything bad as woke, and related yet good ideas as something else. But that is pretty much my stance on the word: while there are positive contributions to be made to the world in the name of social justice, much of what has happened in the last 10 years has been major, predictable failure modes instead, and that collection of failure modes is "wokeness."

The left wing identitarianism and the definition you provided is good and concrete, as I am more interested in what wokeness is, rather than what wokeness does. Once we get into the latter, I feel that we get caught up into identity politics in a way that is not that dissimilar to the thing that that is being derided in the first place. After all, in a banal sense, wokeness is to the right what capitalism is to the left: the source of bad things and an object of scorn.

To me, wokism or calling things woke is a catch all term that someone right of center calls a social activity or value that someone left of center espouses. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard in person or seen online someone left of center that uses it to describe an action or an ideology. When the term is used, it does the following things in the process:

  1. It identifies a value, idea or activity that one disagrees with.
  2. It is always used as a pejorative to what is being described.
  3. It is a virtue signal to those right of center and also identifies one as a right wing ideologue to other right wing ideologues.

I would define socially conscious as the ability to identify differences in race/ethnicity, class, religion, etc, in addition to individual differences. Generally in the last 20+ years, that generally results in moving toward left wing ideology. The field of sociology being probably the most prescient example. How many right of center sociologists do you know?

To me, wokism or calling things woke is a catch all term that someone right of center calls a social activity or value that someone left of center espouses.

It does sometimes get used that way, but I don't know why you would elect to espouse the least clear and useful version of the word as the archetype of the concept. Most people, right or left, are kind of stupid, and when they say political things they are mostly just signalling virtue by parroting something they heard somewhere. Children use words they can't define, sometimes properly, sometimes not; this does not actually muddy the underlying concepts.

So I can't figure out why you're in one breath complaining about people using the word in vague or merely pejorative ways, and in the next breath saying that, to you, that actually is what "woke" means. Any time you see the word in the wild, just substitute "left wing identitarianism" and it should be pretty easy to see whether the person speaking is using the word meaningfully, or just as an empty sneer. In the examples you pulled for me, I don't see any use of the word "woke" as a "nebulous bogeyman." The first two are pretty clear and direct criticisms of left wing identitarianism and the political activities of left wing identitarians. The third is just one person admitting that they aren't sure what "woke" means, precisely, but they can see what it has accomplished.

For instance, I don't think I have ever heard in person or seen online someone left of center that uses it to describe an action or an ideology.

Then you haven't been paying attention (or maybe you're just late to the party). "#StayWoke" was a pretty early example of hashtag activism, circa 2012. The Wikipedia entry on "Woke" has a 2018 picture of former U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge holding a shirt that says "Stay Woke: Vote." The term itself originated back in the mid-20th century and was very much tied to the identity politics of black Americans, and its circuitous path to "viral hashtag meme" generalized rapidly to leftist identity politics generally. None of this is mysterious, and every news article out there complaining about the vagueness of "woke" ignores the well-established history of the meme in an attempt to muddy the waters of discourse, exactly as the political left has always done with words that capture its essence and expose its ridiculousness.

I would define socially conscious as the ability to identify differences in race/ethnicity, class, religion, etc, in addition to individual differences.

If that is your definition, then no, "woke" does not mean "socially conscious." To be "woke" requires a particular political attitude toward those differences; the ability to identify them is not sufficient, for the reasons I already outlined. Specifically, the identitarian right is definitely able to identify such differences, and is definitely not "woke."

We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.

We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again?

Seems to be. I assume that the leftist prospiracy is working to muddy the waters on "woke" because it has become a useful cudgel for rightists, which is a pattern that has been repeated for a while now.

It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.

I haven't noticed this, myself, but I haven't been able to spend as much time here lately as I used to.

I figured a lot of people who previously felt extremely secure and sure of themselves have had that upturned by the election of Trump, and now feel defensive, and if they aren't social media users (or don't want to taint their feed) they need to go somewhere they can talk to the other tribe, and there aren't a lot of those left these days.

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