Liberalism Upended

Woke values — both Left Woke and Right Woke — pose as 'liberal' values, yet they are anything but — in fact they are a perversion (and often an inversion) of the 'real thing' and thus represent a serious threat to the whole edifice upon which our liberal democracies have been constructed. 

The foundational idea that our immediate ancestors have been building upon is that facts transcend culture.  

So, no matter how much individuals or groups express distaste for gays or people from a different race or gender, it should not matter on a societal level at all, because wherever you go in this world in terms of time and place, there will always be certain universal human characteristics which no amount of hatred or oppression will ever do away with. 

Woke, and again, it doesn't matter which extreme we are on about, reverses this proposition: Culture must be understood to transcend facts.

I'd hesitate to use an adverb like cunningly or subtly here, because it is absolutely blatant. It turns liberalism on its head in the most obvious of ways, and yet wants you to somehow not comprehend this and call it out.

And many 'true' liberals don't, because they tend to take on wokeism with facts, which is rather like pissing into the wind. Try arguing with a Trans ideologue using human biology or a Pro-Pal with Middle Eastern history and see where that gets you.

And on many levels the so-called Woke Right are even more fact-resistant and prone to package themselves in a conspiratorial, victimhood narrative which they understand as giving them permission to treat all push back in the most aggressive and ultimately toxic of manners. 

Both kinds of wokies are constantly conceiving of new privileges which can be branded as rights, and therefore protected by anti-discrimination legislation.

Along the way not only is the factual narrative, whether simple or complex, being trampled upon, but another absolutely core liberal idea: that one should be able to think and do whatever one wants to as long as it does not negatively impact on other members of society, not just in terms of what they in turn think and do, but also in terms of the universal rights that they are understood to possess by way of those culture-transcending facts.

Thus the 'rights' of trans women sometimes explicitly violate those of biological women, and they have done so by claiming the higher moral ground, often by commandeering and aggressively planting up there the rainbow flag, which previously stood, with near absolute clarity, for equality based on fixed human universals, a limitation that trans people seem to literally want to transcend.

In the West the rainbow flag is no longer straightforwardly emblematic of the homosexual share of universal human rights and dignity. It now encompasses a range of non-universal, cultural and ideological standpoints, which tend to fall under the banner of ‘queerness’. 

In any properly liberal society, people who live their lives according to a set of cultural precepts do have one key right: to be granted tolerance and compassion — if not affirmation — from those people living their lives according to an alternative, perhaps contrasting set. But this right does not include the privilege of expecting everyone else in their society to sign up to their dogma under pain of censure or punishment. (Sex and religion are rather obviously the key cultural battlegrounds here.)

Anyway, in today's politics the extremes of left and right are not about equality or freedom, no matter how enthusiastically they are invoked and chanted, as both of these values, which blend usefully towards the complex middle, have been distorted almost beyond recognition at opposite ends of the bell curve.

My post the other day about the Peasants' revolt in England in 1381 was, in part, an attempt to show why the start and end points of this curve are basically the same place. 

The very same incident — the same historical moment — looked completely different depending on whether one's perspective was from below looking up, or from above looking down. So that which the peasants perceived as a pivotal opportunity to establish a more radically egalitarian society, the King perceived as a chance to impose a far more authoritarian system.

And so it is in many modern western democracies which are faltering as a result of the combined cultural impacts of populism and wokeism.