Defining "Woke"

[andrewducker]

Aaaaages ago, mountainkiss sent me the article "Woke" is a new ideology and its proponents should admit it. And I disagreed so strenuously with the "It's new!" part of the article that my grumpiness made her think that I thought the whole article was worthless. Which it is not. Because one of the things it does is try to define different aspects of the "Woke" movement, to make it clear what it is. At the time I told her that at some point I'd get around to writing up my opinions of the whole piece, and how it matched up with my experience/understanding.

And then I didn't get enough sleep for about a year, and did nothing with it. And then it came back up again in discussion, and I went and read it again, and had thoughts over lunchtime, and so here you are.

Note: My writing here is informal, and this was quickly written between dozens of other things I'm doing. I'm delighted to be told where I'm wrong about something factual, but please don't nitpick over technicalities.

Second note: I am well aware of the history of the term, and how it's changed over time. I'm predominantly thinking about the use between 2015 and 2019, as that's what the article I'm responding to was clearly doing.

Third note: Where the original section heading was written in a way that might be considered impenetrable I've put a quote underneath from that section to hopefully better explain what they meant.

1) "Woke" emphasises identitarian deference

Of course it is true that the views of women should carry more weight in debates over abortion, and of course people who experience racism should be part of any conversation about racism.

But what separates out the “woke” view from boring, normie liberalism is when an appeal to “lived experience” is seen as an ultimate trump card in a debate.

I do think you'll find some people who believe that it's a total trump card. But I think you'll find plenty of woke people who will agree that different members of a minority will have different opinions, different experiences, and different approaches, and that you can't just pull out one woman from your binder, get her to express an opinion, and declare victory in the argument of "What counts as sexist".

My verdict: Yes, amongst people who are recently converted, or very young, but I don't see that much of it.

2) “Woke” prioritises harm reduction over free speech
Absolutely. No doubt about it. But that shouldn't be a surprise, society has always had some limits on free speech, and when people see the long-term effect of letting people shout obscenities, or organise hatred against minorities, they may well decide that harm reduction is more important.

My verdict: It absolutely does, although how much it prioritises it will vary from person to person.

3) “Woke” is totalising

This is (obviously) a real thing that happens and an “intersectional” view can be a useful framework for understanding how different “vectors of oppression” can overlap and multiply the difficulties that people face. However, it also does something else: It makes politics totalising, and makes it harder for the ideologically “woke” to form broader political coalitions.

Yes, definitely. Part of it is realising that the goal is not to switch your favoured group from the oppressed side to the oppressor side, but to prevent oppression. If the feminists are happy to throw the working class under the bus to get what they want, the working class are happy to throw ethnic minorities under the bus to get what they want, and the ethnic minorities are happy to throw the women under the bus to get what they want, then the chances are that none of them are going to get what they want. This kind of thing was really really common in the 60s, with women being told that as soon as we had communism women wouldn't be oppressed (so please stop making a fuss and work on the Class War instead of pushing for Women's Lib). Either we all work out how to make things better for each other, and to spread empathy wider, supporting each other even when we won't personally gain from it, or we will all go to hell in the same handbasket.

My verdict: Absolutely, this is core to Wokery.

4) “Woke” is communitarian

Where “woke” ideology differs is that it pushes this equilibrium further towards a communitarian conception of rights. We can see this in terms of how identity characteristics are foregrounded, and the way in which adherents view their relationship to other humans in terms of group membership.

I think that there's a fundamental misunderstanding here. You don't get special rights because you're in a group. Wokery is about the right not be oppressed, and recognises that different groups are oppressed in different ways. It's the inverse of "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

So identity groupings are treated as important, but largely in terms of how much sympathy/help people might need. The groups that are considered important from a wokeness point of view are considered important because they are groups that are viewed as targetted for oppression (or end up oppressed because of the design of society).

Is it important that someone is a trainspotter? Almost certainly not (Unless we're using that as a shortcut for "Is autistic", which we probably shouldn't). Is it important that someone is a lesbian? Absolutely, insofar as they may face increased difficulties in life because of it, and we should be aware of how the design of society affects them.

So, do lesbians get their rights from membership of The Lesbian Group? Or do they get extra attention purely to ensure that they get the same rights as everyone else? The woke would definitely say the latter.

Verdict: I would say absolutely not. I can see how people come to that conclusion, but I think it's a misreading of the situation.

5) “Woke” is sceptical of ‘progress’
Yes and no. I think that there is a general acceptance that things are less bad in many ways. But also that many, many people have been "left behind", that there are still many, many issues, and that the rising tide that lifts enough boats to prevent revolution, while leaving the worst off to drown is not a universally good thing. I think a certain amount of scepticism is a good thing, and you can definitely have that while being grateful that things are better than they were.

Verdict: Somewhat. You'll see more scepticism in the newly converted and people whose background means they've seen the worst of things.

6) “Woke” prioritises right-side norms over accuracy norms

For example, in a community of political activists or football fans, it may be more important to be on the “right side” of a debate: There is the risk of a social penalty that makes it much harder to concede that the other side made a good point, or the referee’s decision to award the other team a penalty was correct, because it will invite the ire of your friends and colleagues.

Absolutely, and this is a bad thing. Not everyone does it, it may well be that no more than the human average does it, but it is still bad. If you don't own your mistakes then you can't learn from them.

Verdict: Largely yes, with the proviso that I would *love* to know how much this happens across all of society, and whether Woke people are any worse/better than anyone else.

Overall
There is absolutely a chunk of truth in the article, and I think it makes a good starting point for discussion. Thinking about why it was wrong (where I thought it was) was a helpful exercise in itself.

I do think that the writer was living in a bubble (the way he refers to a liberal consensus makes that clear), and that affects the slant he puts on things. But I don't think he's deliberately mischaracterising things, and I think that seeing how Wokery looks from that side of things is interesting and useful.

I also think that there's an issue where the recent converts to a cause tend to be more black and white in their thinking about it and louder in their defense of it. Which means that the impression you get of a group is going to be coloured by their take on things.

Comments

[mountainkiss]

I do not in any way regard myself as an authority on any social or political topic, so I do not confuse "I have not seen..." with "there does not exist...", but my other point here is that I just haven't seen this depth of analysis of the term anywhere else.

[mountainkiss]

I mean, the resurgence of this thread was catalysed by this in yesterday's roundup: "For some time now, my working hypothesis has been that the word woke is synonymous with ethnic (and minority representation): it is used primarily by people who believe that ethnic representation is an unreservedly bad thing or (to translate that into plain English) racists."

[andrewrilstone]

My article was specifically about how the word woke is used by people who use it in a pejorative sense. I certainly don’t deny that some people hold the cluster of left-wing ideas described in the second article, and you are welcome to call them Woke if you want to.

But I query whether the person who says that 20 mph speed limits are woke, or that it’s woke for a chain of bakeries to start selling vegan sausage rolls has that kind of definition in mind. The person who says that there is a powerful woke mob that controls the whole of government media and education certainly doesn’t.

It is theoretically possible Russell Davies cast Ncuti Gatwa as Doctor Who because he subscribes to an extreme identitarian racial ideology. It is possible that no one who didn’t subscribe to such an ideology would have made such a casting choice. It is even possible that every person who says that Doctor Who has gone woke honestly believes that Davies or the BBC are committed to such an ideology. But I think that, in most cases, it is simply a swear word that conservatives direct at liberals (much as fascist is a swear word that liberals direct at conservatives).

Trotskyite has a definite meaning in context of a discussion about the Russian revolution or left-wing political discourse. But when but when someone says that Jeremy Corbyn is a trot, they mostly just mean “I think he’s too left-wing”.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that it carries enough weight to need one, most of the time. It originates with a catchphrase "Stay woke", expands to being a hashtag, gets picked up by the Social Justice movement, and then gets glommed onto by the backlash to that movement. At no point does it get a strict definition, because it's not used by anyone as a flag to nail their colours to, or as a coherent set of beliefs.

What the post I responded to is really talking about is the social justice movement, where it was regularly used as that slogan. But all it meant there was "Alert to the prejudices which surround us". And, again, there's no *formal* social justice network, there's just people, talking about the world in similar ways.

[mountainkiss]

I suspect, though, that this means I've been looking* in the wrong places; there will be definitions of how the social justice movement is unique that are much closer to this in depth and comprehensiveness.

*"looking" is doing a lot of work here. I'm not looking actively, though I'm interested in what I find by chance.

[andrewducker]

I'd recommend starting with the Occupy Movement, which is where the modern social justice movement really kicked off, and tied in with the broadening of The Culture War, which ties in directly with the broadening usage of "Woke" which is what that post is talking about.

[calimac]

1) I think this is more widespread than you believe. I've more than once had the experience, when I mentioned what members of Minority Group X had told me, for another member of that group to say that was wrong and to insist with great vehemence that I should not listen to those other people but only to themself.

2) Regrettably, this is sometimes necessary. Trolls weaponizing free speech spoils it for everybody.

3) I'm confused by this, as I thought the original, positive intention of the word "woke" was to indicate understanding of other people's oppression.

4) Yes, but there's not always an indication of sufficient subtlety that, for instance, a lesbian in a small town in west Texas needs more added attention to her rights than one in San Francisco. There's a lot of lumping together going on here.

5) I see a lot of rhetoric on the lines of "since it's not perfect, it's terrible," and this is framed as a counterargument to the view that, since it's better than it was, it's near enough to perfect as no matter.

6) I think this is extremely common in homogenous groups.

[andrewducker]

(1) definitely happens. I've encountered it myself. But I do think it's only the particularly excitable members of the group who are like that.

(3) The original meaning seems to be black people talking to other black people about racism.

(4) Agreed.

(5) Definitely a lot of tension there.

[mountainkiss]

I'm also curious about your sources, for example for the statement "Wokery is about the right not be oppressed, and recognises that different groups are oppressed in different ways."

[andrewducker]

I'm talking about the people who used the word woke, back when it was used, and what they wanted. The progressive movement, and how it operated (and still does, just with different language, as it evolves over time). And I don't have sources, I just watched the way it was used by the people who used it about themselves.

That sentence you've quoted there, for instance, is just intersectionality (which I think I first encountered (along with Kyriarchy) in about 2009). But intersectionality is definitely part of the way that the current progressive movements which identified with Social Justice (in about 2010) and then with being Woke (in about 2015) tend to approach things.

So I don't have sources any more than the person who wrote the original piece does. I've just observed the same things they have. Although, from the way they write about them, from less of a distance, and for longer.

[mountainkiss]

To be fair I'm also curious about the author's sources.

I think the point about writing from a distance is very relevant here. It's what I like about it and what you don't.

[andrewducker]

If he was more aware that "the liberal consensus" was also a small group, rather than a societal standard, and that he was writing a comparative piece about one group largely from the view of another one, and not writing a "Here's what they're really like" it would improve his piece quite a lot :-)

(Which is to say that his piece is clearly written as "This is the effect they are having on my lot" rather than "Here is what they believe" - the latter requires you to spend time with them, learning their ways, rather than staring at them through a telescope.)

[mountainkiss]

Perhaps then this is telling me that I’m more interested in the effect they’re having on his lot than in what they believe. That’s not necessarily true but is worth prodding, which I think is best done by looking at your other links.

[andrewducker]

Definitely worth having a think about!

[danieldwilliam]

I think the word "woke" might have faired better if had come with a manifesto or a proposed definition earlier on. It strikes me that it's a word that had a useful informal meaning in one context which has been then used to mean some confluence of broader and deeper concept without much attempt to describe in advance what it is and what it isn't.

So it's been used as Welsh shawl for a variety of strawman arguments. Anyone who doesn't like any of the borader and deeper concepts and wants to throw mud at the "woke agenda" has a great opportunity to do so because "woke" is an ill-defined term.

[andrewducker]

The thing is that nobody *tried* to make the word "Woke" a coherent philosophy or organisation. It's not like the Occupy groups. It was a simple slogan meaning "Notice the ways that society is set up to make things worse for people." that spread organically.

The fact that the right then picked it up, pretended it was a coherent agenda, and attacked it as a way of furthering the Culture Wars, as they tend to. But there's no organisation there to actually be attacked.

[danieldwilliam]

I think that's what I mean.

[danieldwilliam]

It occured to me that "woke" is perhaps a negative ideology. It's not actually defined by its advocates or supporters. It's almost entirely defined by people who are opposed to it (whatever it is) or (at best) people like James O'Malley who are not part of the movement and a bit sceptical about it and also confused by the lack of defination.