The “Woke” are Sleepwalking in a Fog of Western Decadence

How to see past the tribal output of a vacuous culture war

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

What do identity politics, political correctness, wokeness, micro-aggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, cancel culture, critical race theory, virtue signaling, affirmative action, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) have in common?

If you asked those on the left of the mass media’s manufactured culture war, some would say those catchphrases are all boogeymen concocted by conservatives who mean to distract from the benefits of progressive society, and from conservatives’ aversion to further advances in the pursuit of social justice. Consequently, progressives might be emotionally triggered by some of those catchphrases, seeing in them only diabolical conservative schemes.

If you asked those on the right, they’d say those labels indicate some ills of a secular culture that latches on to unsustainable, newfangled idols, making fools of those who denigrate the older values and traditions of Western civilization. These conservatives would be blind to the fact that there’s right-wing political correctness too.

To break the deadlock, what’s needed here are sociological, historical, and existential perspectives that enable us to see past the partisans’ tribal defensiveness and the bogus conflict that fuels the social media conglomerates.

The irony of progress

If anything, what unites the above medley of grievances is a form of secular liberal decadence. Here we can turn to Oswald Spengler who argued that all cultures decline in their independent, characteristic ways, depending on their founding values. What’s the endpoint of liberal progress? One possibility is the mass infantilization of consumers. Think of the hapless but happy humans in the movie “WALL-E,” those who’ve grown so dependent on corporations and technology that their lives have become wholly automated and trivial.

How would we expect adult babies to act? They’d whine at the prospect of even the least hardship, which means they’d be oversensitive. But that mental weakness would be possible only if certain kinds of progress were in effect. Only massive advances in science, industry, and technology could turn society into such a playpen, eradicating all traces of nature’s wildness from the urban environment. These Edenic citizens would be Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last men,” those who enlist their machines to conquer for them so that they’d have become deaf to the call for personal heroism in the creation of values.

Of course, it’s not babyish to oppose slavery or to support the prosecution of criminals. Those who demand social justice in the sense of fighting for the civil rights that all people deserve — including women and minorities — aren’t being infantile or decadent. Instead, they’re being heroic by contributing to civilization’s attempt to outdo nature’s mindless shuffling of constructs. The emergence of personhood is an anomaly in the evolution of life, and contrary to Nietzsche, we shouldn’t submit to natural norms in approving of dominance hierarchies since that would only betray our species’ creative potential.

This doesn’t mean all social hierarchies are villainous, however, since some qualitative differences might be real and important. Just because we shouldn’t approve of oppressive hierarchies that enslave women and labourers doesn’t mean we should pretend that all outcomes on a fair playing field are bound to be equal or hand out the best trophies just for participating in life. We should honour excellence and encourage those who fail to try again and do better. And we shouldn’t let those who fail fall through the cracks; instead, we should support them with a social safety net. It’s just that such a net needn’t be turned into a baby’s playpen that obfuscates all real differences.

Social progress is a way of overcoming natural reality, so there’s no such progress if we’re too weak-minded to acknowledge the facts. The decadence in question is a case of taking progress for granted.

We do this, for instance, when we presume that cultural “content” should be free — as if artists don’t need money to live. Or we obtain pirated content on the internet, bypassing the business that pays the content creators, and then we’re surprised and disappointed when that creator’s output dries up. We take the stream of content for granted, though, because we presume other content creators will come along and take the place of those who’ve dropped out of the stream.

Here we see how producers who cater to spoiled consumers degrade themselves in a rat race. Think of how adults, too, belittle themselves when they resort to baby-talk to please a baby. Adults stoop to the baby’s level and overact with gibberish to catch the baby’s attention — which is harmless enough. But in the gig economy, the comparable stooping eliminates the possibility of a middle class of artists, as content creators indulge the dictates of the algorithms that make all the discernments once the consumers have been addicted to social media and infantilized.

The impotence of conservatism

Now, conservatives have naturally overplayed their hand in exaggerating the problem of left-wing decadence. They mean to gaslight everyone into thinking that liberals are communists, progress is pointless and reckless, up is down, and black is white. Conservatives add nothing of value to the conversation in so far as they’re implicitly anti-humanistic in calling for policies that would return us to a paradise for neo-medievalists. This conservative paradise would resemble virtually any of the premodern kingdoms or empires that featured totalitarian monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and slavery.

Rather than wanting to abolish all social hierarchies, conservatives err in the opposite direction by preferring the very social hierarchy that’s worthless because it’s only natural and therefore amoral. If we were to let our instincts take over and stop thinking as human persons but were to hold on to our sedentary societies (instead of returning to a life of hunter-gatherers), we’d find ourselves in an empire of old in which the strong dominate the weak, and a minority of aristocrats live in luxury while the majority must content itself with squalor and ignorance. That’s what the effects of conservative policies reveal that social and economic conservatives want, their public relations ploys notwithstanding.

In the hands of conservatives, then, the objection to progressive decadence acts as a smokescreen since what the conservative really rejects is humanistic progress in its entirety. Conservatives revere not God but nature, not anything like Jesus’s supernatural kingdom for the spiritually poor, but the norms of animality such as the law of oligarchy that took over large societies until the rise of absolute modernity in the Scientific Revolution.

But just because so-called conservatism provides no good-faith principles for a sound criticism of anything doesn’t mean there’s no valid critique of modernity.

After all, there are at least two relevant sorts of degradation. Conservatives would degrade women, workers, and minorities in a cruel, naturally wild dominance hierarchy that’s fit for animals rather than people.

But liberals are poised to impose another kind of degradation, one that ironically results from modern progress. After all, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. For instance, quantity matters in the eating of food since eating too much of even a type of vegetable can turn that nourishment into a poison.

The ambiguity of empires

We should reflect here on what Yuval Harari says about empires, in Sapiens, which is that they’re morally ambiguous. As a great engine of social change, an empire is enormously innovative but also monstrous in its exploitation of underclasses.

Liberals are supposed to be rationally enlightened, yet for centuries they apologized for sexism and slavery, failing to appreciate the humanity of women and non-Europeans. While those injustices have since been largely forbidden, many who consider themselves progressive fail to see the injustices built into capitalism and consumerism. Developed societies rely on developing ones that pay their workers slave wages, and meat-eating consumers depend on industrial farms that enslave and torture animals.

More to the point, though, is that imperial ambiguity shows up in the treatment of relatively rich consumers themselves. Again, what counts as progress in one sense looks like degradation in another. By having built high-tech societies that obey our whims at the touch of a button, we lose some of the strengths of human heroism. We become pampered and hypersensitive so that we exaggerate certain vestigial social ills to retain our sense of tribal identity. We become addicted to whining so that we can think of ourselves as warriors for social justice, even if we’re just fixated on cheap virtue signals instead of looking for solutions to the graver problems of plutocracy, looming environmental catastrophe, and the modern meaning crisis.

This infantilization is apparent in the progressive’s presumption that there are thought crimes. Notice, then, the contrast between the religious idealist’s condemnation of certain thoughts as sins, and the progressive’s comparable intolerance. Early Christians, for instance, were countercultural radicals and absolutists who were enthralled by a charismatic vision of values that condemned the earthly winners in life. These idealists cared too much about mythic rationalizations that turned out to be far-fetched.

For an altogether different reason, progressive egalitarians equate politically incorrect speech or so-called micro-aggressions with full-blown acts of villainy: rather than being idealists, these hyper-liberals are more like nihilists who rely on algorithms and influencers to do their thinking for them. Rather than being enthralled by an ideology, these progressives are too decadent to do the hard work of thinking. Their streams of thought and behaviours are automated. They think in terms of platitudes and clichés, virtue signals, and tribal mantras. They oppose politically incorrect speech not on ideological grounds, but because they’re implicitly opposed to art itself.

Art generally is politically incorrect because politics lends itself to propaganda, whereas art is countercultural and often subversive. But infantile, duped adults such as consumers who would rather not contemplate their participation in a morally ambiguous, potentially self-destructive neoliberal empire aren’t interested in art’s neoshamanic function. They want infinite content, not art, and content in this sense is a never-ending stream of reassuring, vapid, informationally siloed messages. Just as babies love to repeat games until their parents are tired of the practice, infantile consumers want more and more of the same, unaware that their precious streams have become toxic.

The heroism of secular humanists

The bottom line is that, as secular humanism implies, acts of sexism and racism are, of course, appalling. Social justice and injustice are real. Minorities such as homosexuals or dark-skinned individuals shouldn’t suffer unnecessarily and arbitrarily, due to a double standard that favours rich, white, heterosexual men, many of whom are anachronistic conservatives or infantile, hyper-liberal consumers. And these minorities or underclasses suffer the worst in developing countries.

But in taking up a big-picture view of societies in history, we should be aware of ironies. Too much of a type of progress can be counterproductive. And those who deem themselves “woke” or morally awakened can be rather sleepwalking in a daze of collective routines, oblivious to more pressing concerns than the use of offensive labels or the stubborn lack of perfectly equal outcomes in a social competition.

Rather than falling for the tribal identities that Big Tech platforms generate, we should focus on the big picture of our historic mission as humanists: we progress as a species in opposition to the inhumanity of wild, godless nature.