As a young academic, educated largely in the Western liberal arts tradition, and emerging from Canadian grad school in the mid-nineties, my thoughts on the world were, back then, influenced by an eclectic variety of thinkers, writers and scholars - mostly left-leaning - as well as the only rebel “thinker” and “activist” of whom I’ve ever really been a fan: Jesus Christ.
As time went on, and years became decades, my intellectual life became increasingly fraught, with the gradual realization that North American public universities and colleges had profoundly lost their way.
Once places that taught the upcoming generation *how* to think, our campuses have largely become places that teach *what* to think.
That is not education.
And it is not healthy for democratic society.
Simultaneously, I was discovering profound and inspirational thinkers and writers within the various catholic and protestant Christian streams of thought - some academics, but many not. Here I found a depth of thought missing from the vapid secular community of activism, navel-gazing, and non-thought which our left-leaning public universities have largely now become.
And for me, I can mark exactly when and where any willingness on my part to align myself with secular leftist though ended: It was in April 2011 at a public lecture by Noam Chomsky at MIT.
Chomsky spent what seemed like an eternity rambling on about absolutely nothing. If I had paid admission, I would have asked for my money back.
“The left is dead”, I said to myself, as I drove back to my young family at our Boston-area hotel.
But then, just a few months ago, someone introduced me to the work of the UK writer and thinker Joanna Williams. Somewhat reluctantly calling herself (at least privately) a feminist in the leftist tradition, Williams has for me been a breath of fresh air.
And finally, in late May, I met her at Western University at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. We had a couple of wonderful conversations centred around her new book, How Woke Won.
Tracing the history of the word “woke” back to grass-roots black activist thought in the 1920s, in her accessible and engaging 2022 book, Williams points out that woke has now instead ironically become a pretentious top-down set of loosely-connected social ideas, perpetuated by self-serving cultural elites.
There has been a simultaneous and related shift in left-wing thinking in universities and popular culture in recent years, Williams suggests, “away from a focus on social class and economic inequalities and toward identity politics”.
Woke left-leaning adherents speak against “white privilege”, “microaggressions”, “trans-phobia”, perceived working-class attitudes, and sexual discrimination - while actually doing *nothing* to seriously challenge any systemic social problems.
It’s far easier to naively trot out a few grammatically-incorrect pronouns (don’t get me started), wave a few flags, put up a few signs, and applaud the toppling of a few statues.
And meanwhile, to anyone who looks beyond the surface platitudes and symbolic actions, underpinning the woke movement there is actually an interest in perpetuating victimhood, a underlying misogyny, an outright hatred of the working class, an interest in totalitarianism and social control, and a dislike of anything approaching true freedom of speech.
Ironically, especially in our once-free public libraries, and on our once-open university and college campuses.
Sadly, Williams points out, “where students once demanded freedom of speech, woke students want freedom *from* speech.”
It’s as if murderous Mao himself (see my last book review of Ai Weiwei’s “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows” on Instagram and Facebook) were secretly directing things from beyond the grave. Or maybe something even more sinister is afoot amongst us.
Time will tell, Dear Reader. Time will tell.
Ever the optimist, however, Williams ends her engaging book on a positive note, suggesting that “woke will never gain ground among citizens who recognize that people have far more in common than the cultural elite would have us believe. It is only through coming together that we can hope to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future….Woke may have won, but only for now.”
Williams, Joanna. How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. Croydon, UK: Spiked, 2022.
Lee-Anne Broadhead and Sean Howard, “Confronting the Contradictions between Western Science and Indigenous Science: A Critical Perspective on Two-Eyed Seeing.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 17.1 (2021), p. 111.↩︎
Ibid., p. 117.↩︎
For some thoughtful analysis of this idea see Mark Mercer’s Indigenizing Science, SAFS Newsletter, Number 95 (April 2023), pp. 35-39.↩︎
Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz, “Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconciliation, and Decolonization: Navigating the Different Visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy.”↩︎
See Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody, Durham, North Carolina, Pitchstone Publishing, 2020, Chapter 3.↩︎
This talk went ahead and can be viewed on Frances Widdowson’s YouTube channel.↩︎