Left Is Not Woke

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Neiman offers a clear and incisive rebuttal to such “standpoint epistemology.” She notes that such appeals rest on multiple fallacies, among them, (1) the essentialist notion that the perspective of any individual marginalized person is defined by the most oppressive identity category imposed upon them, and is therefore representative of that marginalized group’s broader perspective, and (2) the idea that victimhood and trauma necessarily confer great insight.

Philosophy, for Susan Neiman, is a martial art. Her sharp argument that woke is not left because left is universalist while woke is progressive-styled tribalism will stir a much-needed debate.” Samuel Huneke lauds the fashionable view of many postcolonial thinkers that “reason is an imposition of European power on a global scale.” Perhaps that’s why his review of my Left Is Not Woke exhibits less reason than rage, blinding him to the fact that most of his objections are answered in the book itself. The book thus sets out to defend the Enlightenment against “standard contemporary readings,” which are more accurately just called critical readings. For much of the last century, the Enlightenment—a loose movement of European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who emphasized individual reason over tradition and religion—occupied a privileged place in the origin stories of liberalism. It was the moment when human rights and democracy became thinkable to Europeans as organizing political principles. In these bleak times, Susan Neiman's book arrives as a breath of fresh air. Calmly but fiercely defending the principles of universalism and progress that once defined the left, she gives us a counter to the narrow tribalism that threatens to derail progressive politics.”SN: Let’s not think of culture as a commodity, but as a communication. What’s crazy about the current identitarianism is that it reduces us to the two aspects of identity over which we have no control. Instead of the ideas you have, the judgments you make, the crafts you take up, the skill that you learn and relationships you enter—you are reduced to the two elements of identity that you have the least control over, and which can best serve you as a victim. SN: That’s exactly right. All you have to do is to descend from the abstract to particular cases and you find way more international agreements. Susan Neiman:And, I mean, I have to be very clear about this. The Germans after the war did not initially want to do any form of atonement at all. In fact, one of the insights that I had when I was working on this material was, they sounded exactly like defenders of the lost cause. Germans, particularly west Germans in the early decades after the war would say things like, "Well, we lost the war and our cities were in ruins and ashes." And, "We lost seven million citizens and our men were in POW camps and we were hungry, just barely alive." That's a citation, I don't know if anybody will recognize it, but there was a moment when I was driving on the highway in the States and Joan Baez "Is the Night they Drove Old Dixie Down" came on the radio and I thought, Baez sang in Selma when white people were getting killed in Selma. Baez was not just virtue signaling, she was on the right side when there was a cause to be on the right side and she is singing a hymn to the confederacy. It's a beautiful song, but I started imagining, what if I were singing, you know, The Night They Drove The Wehrmacht Down? You know? Thus, both Neiman’s conception of “wokeness” and her basis for asserting that it is objectively not left wing, are clear. The fairness of her critique is less so. The most frustrating aspect of her book is its persistent refusal to provide concrete examples of the contemporary arguments, behaviors, and causes to which she objects. This is especially problematic since Neiman’s definition of wokeness seems to describe, in part, implicit or unintended implications of certain modes of progressive discourse. It seems unlikely that very many “woke” activists are explicitly arguing that there is no such thing as justice, nor any possibility of social progress; the very act of demanding greater concern for the marginalized would seem to contradict such premises.

MB: In a similar way, non-white people who don’t toe to the party line, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali or John McWhorter, are being dismissed as “race traitors” or “Uncle Toms.” She is not for a moment seeking to minimize those traumas but rather to critique the emphasis on suffering as the most important marker of collective identity. Left-of-center critics of wokeness, meanwhile, tend to have a narrower target in mind. Mainstream liberals sometimes use it to denote an extreme or illiberal turn in progressive political culture since the Obama years, while some socialists deploy it to deride the superficial moralism of virtue-signaling corporations. Still, such critiques often fail to make clear where progressive politics ends and the “woke” variety begins.Neiman’s book delineates the differences between wokeness and the positions of earlier left-wing thinkers, and how wokeness has become increasingly regressive under the influence of identity politics. “Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive, somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive,” she writes, “but now this is only so when it is done by other people. Self-essentializing and self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered empowering.” The upshot is that members of disadvantaged communities are further disempowered in the name of progress. Wokeness, Neiman explains, “begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization.” Let no one confuse what this book has to say with the tired right-wing denunciation of ‘identity politics.’ The right-wing critique charges promoters of difference and multiculturalism with undermining the shared legacy of the national culture. It is a battle pitting one avowed particularism against another alleged particularism. Left Is Not Woke accuses some trendy voices of the left of a fatal self-betrayal: renouncing the very grounds on which the left has traditionally stood, the concepts and principles in the name of which it has fought its battles and advanced its ends, above all, universalism.” Defining wokeness as nothing more than an “awareness of injustice” is—to use a term favored by progressive thinkers— gaslighting. It tells parents worried about their kids being taught that gender is fluid, or employees reluctant to attend yet another mandatory diversity-training workshop, that their eyes and ears deceive them. “There is no such thing as woke,” claim the deniers; there is just progress and kindness. “Woke” is an invention, a figment of the right-wing imagination. Denouncing “wokeness” is, they claim, a cover for bigotry. SN: Correct, but he’s also giving you the sense that whatever you do to fight those mechanisms of oppression they are bigger than you and you are even part of it. It’s an extraordinary call to defeatism or resignation. It was even unclear whether he was on the side of prison reform. When people talked about concrete improvements that would make the lives of prisoners better, Foucault would just say: “Ah that’s trivial.” A lot of so-called progressive academics have come think that all you need to do is to deconstruct mechanisms of power. But deconstruction by itself is not a political act.