I am increasingly of this view myself. Woke is not a thing imposed so much as an emergent property of Western Liberalism. That said, it doesn't really work and leads to deep failure. So there is that.
I too have been guilty of believing a Machiavellian elite have imposed all this, or at least funded it. But as you allude to, the ideas found fertile ground. Many other funded crackpot ideas have not. There is something in liberalism that appeals.
Personally I think it is emotionally appealing to those averse to thinking. Minimum wages is a simple example. A nice neat declaration you care about the poor and those horrible conservatives banging on about better training are monsters. Much of it may be this. A great deal is simply not questioned; all the examples you listed, global warming, colonialism etc. They are accepted since only the uneducated would reject them. That is certainly whay my own circle are like. People who voted for Brexit are in the same bucket as white supremacist Nazis etc. No thinking required.
I don't think the ideas destroying us have widespread support. But they seem absolutely embraced by the managerial layer actually running the country, and that means guaranteed decline. When I see what otherwise educated people believe, will do, and espouse to others I am at a loss to explain it except brainwashing. Covid taught me most are conformists and I fear it will be no different for all the things that are killing us. They will keep going until we are erased.
“ . . . not Marxism . . . liberal individualism in extreme . . .” is a unique take; very much against the grain - perhaps you’re right. Strange that, after several years, the term/word/concept “woke” is still so hard to define, as is where it came from. Sort of a mental version of the Spanish Flue, hopefully, but I think you are spot on about it not being over. It’s another lesson re human nature.
"a pseudo-intellectual sophistry in the defence of inherent absurdities and a deactivation of whatever native common sense they came in with…"
Wonderfully put! I think it is tied into the false consensus that we have experienced a great leap in evolution. Despite the fact that evolutionary theory is built on the slow process over hundreds of million years, a kind of mass hysteria formed largely since 1900, picking up speed till the present, that we are in the final phases of evolution--that we have arrived at utopia. We are what evolution has been working toward. That we haven't is slow to dawn on us.
Much of our self-image, our narcissism, has been enabled entirely by the story we tell ourselves about our ancestors, invariably pictured as prehuman brutes. The common on-line persona regards even the ancient Greek philosophers as more ignorant than they. They can look down on even on Shakespeare, and the Bible might as well have been written in hieroglyphics and by morons. Anyone who fails to see how smart we are should go back to their cave and draw animals in the dark.
I think the more mundane example of this phenomenon is the educated classes disdain for trade workers. As uneducated types they are little more than brutes. That's why we must embrace a technocratic panopticon otherwise they'll just keep eating steak and drinking booze.
It is the insufferable arrogance I cannot stand. Our countries are maintained by a class of people hated by the university educated.
Sir, your writing is brilliant. Of course, it helps that I agree with every word you say. However, if it was the antithesis of my beliefs, I would still enjoy your writing because you have an incredible "way with words." Thank you for all you do.
"Could it be that the massive late 20th Century expansion of tertiary education (that seemed in the 1980s to be progress-on-a-stick) might have actually spread more ignorance than enlightenment?" Great point! And could it be that this design was baked into the educational system from the beginning, as the late John Taylor Gatto made clear in his "Underground History Lesson"? (Available on YouTube)
Particularly since WWII, the social engineers hired by our military intelligence agencies and corporations—Ph.D psychologists, as was outed by the documentary film The Corporation—have been busy shaping the public narrative. They are essentially dutiful acolytes of Edward Bernays, who pointed out in 1929 that those who control the narrative are the de facto rulers of society. This is also known as Fifth Generation warfare, or "psyops." All this is laid out in detail in essential books such as The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot (a history of the CIA), James Corbett's new book Reportage, and Robert Malone's PsyWar.
I believe the social upheavals of the '60s caught them by surprise, and were for the most part genuine. So these agencies realized they had to get ahead of the curve and co-opt future insurgency movements. This they have successfully done with every movement since the '70s, including Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, etc. In some cases they CREATE the "insurgency" movement and then promote it through media and education, which explains the "woke" movement. Gullible youngsters are misled into seeing these movements as cool and progressive, co-opting their natural inclination to rebel against the older generation, with a pre-ordained outlet for their insurgent energies.
Theodore Dalrymple and Adam Curtis have been making similar points about tertiary education and Edward Bernays respectively for a while now. Both worth reading/watching in my opinion.
Excellent. I hope there is some small bit of good news on one of your items, the tertiary education complex. The good news is that enrollment has declined prior to the demographic cliff, in part because schools have been driving decent people away; consequently fewer people are getting brainwashed.
I'm more and more minded to think that woke progressivism is a mutant offshoot of Christianity, or maybe a current Reformation.
Luther begat the late 60s social activist movement begat the Great Awakening revved up during lockdown with the imposition of BLM and Trans Women Are Women credos.
Indeed none other than Tom Holland author of "Dominion" considers our current situation to be a Reformation started in 1968.
If it's true we're naturally selected for belief, or even God created us to find salvation in faith, then woke progressivism ticks both boxes.
What we're seeing maybe for the first time is the vertical radicalisation of traditional faith with the horizontal radicalisation that only the internet could have created.
And as a faith based system so inhabited by the biggest brains in society, where these people are the most easily fooled, the least likely to search their souls and test their thinking, total wishful thinking has been passed down, and side to side, to convert the Enlightenment into creeds that have less substance and truth than astrology and homeopathy.
Throw in the moves to weaponised kindness, unmoored from any objective rules, and you have a deracinated culture that has sucked the energy and humility out of the Enlightenment West.
The ascent of the self-esteem/self-love paradigm (especially in the university-indoctrinated) since the 1980s or thereabouts, is perhaps inversely related to the slow demise of Christian tenets in Western societies. Values such as humility and modesty, which until a few decades ago were just accepted as being "how we behave". As you indicate, the advent of social media has elevated "look at me" culture to the point that incessant bragging and ostentatious behaviour is now seen by the majority as healthy and normal. And "woke" is woven into this hyper-visible gesture culture, so to speak.
Well said indeed, chock full of good, cognitive nourishment......dispiriting to think sometimes that, while indeed there is certainly a 'woke' global techno-managerial elite, tens of millions of one's countrymen blithely, unthinkingly swim in 'woke' waters......
If, as originally intended, woke means to be aware, how does that fit in with your essay? Woke is the contemporary version on "hip" which was the contemporary version if "hep." The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change. The current version of conservatives have morphed into Trumpists and are attempting to destroy everything that holds society together and makes it possible for the poor to exist. The silver lining is that Trump has only 4 yrs. to destroy the social fabric and that's not enough time, unless he goes full fascist, to do that. The Australians, in the recent election vetoed Trumpism and I suspect most of the free world will do the same.
We clearly see things differently George. I am one of those who believe that Western liberal individualism had a wonderful 300 year run but (like all things in the long run) has fallen apart. Why?....because it crashed, like a spoilt kid through all sorts of boundaries....moral, philosophical and spiritual that it failed to comprehend.
All the essays on this Substack argue the case for what I've just said....I can't do better in a single comment.
I am not sure I really understand what you are saying here, especially about individualism. But I am now biased by having read the book by Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual [2014]; further augmented by reading Tom Holland's Dominion [2019]. They assert that the rise of ideas about liberal individualism are derived from the Western Judeo-Christian cultural influences as to how and what bring human means. Clearly other cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have not adopted quite the same outlook [and dare I now add Russia under Putin?].
Perhaps "because it crashed, like a spoilt kid through all sorts of boundaries....moral, philosophical and spiritual that it failed to comprehend...", this deserves another essay addressing this more deeply? I for one would welcome reading that, if properly presented and supported. :-)
This Spectator piece was necessarily short and sweet... but my 4-part Madness of Intelligentsias essay series is - l like to think anyway - that deeper philosophical delve. Can I persuade you to revisit it?
I hope it is not news to you that today "Woke" has been flipped into the derisive term of distain for the idiocy of DEI, critical theory, the racialist industry, and other Progressive [nee communist ] nostrums. As Lorenzo Warby [ https://www.lorenzofromoz.net ] has pointed out on many of his Substack essays, the Progressive mind is always playing with an imagined future where there are no metrics or measures of competence or rational feedback to correct "wrong think". [I find Lorenzo to be especially skilled at "connecting the dots" among various historical, economic, social, and political factoids.]
"The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change. " There may be several versions of "conservative" but at its core conservatives are not against change, just change for change's sake. Their main focus is on reality and prudence. The concept of Chesterton's Fence speaks to this idea, too.
As an American, I won't apologize for Trump's actions, and his core aims to realign the "world order" with a more reserved or "stepped back" role of America, so the rest of the Westernized (sort of democratic) republics and prosperous nations can increase their respective contributions beyond what they have and do still contribute [especially within the Five Eyes community]. I gather the current phrasing is not so much "American First" meaning America alone, as America with even more supportive and responsive and responsible allies. But too many of those allies [5 Eyes and others] have been marinating in Wokeness related ideas for a long time. They also need to recognize their populist political threads are growing and will not be silenced or quashed forever.
I gather our Substack host is simply saying this desired and required transition may not come about as easily or quickly as we impatient Americans might like.
The term woke is claimed to mean awakened by its advocates. However, it is used as an insult by those who observe its real world effect. Open borders and the mixing of alien peoples, the artificial elevation of the less able under the guise of diversity, the castration of boys, the vandalism of European cultures in Europe and North America. None of this is hip; it is destructive. It builds nothing. Therefore most people are not woke in any meaningful sense evenif they appear to go along with it.
Trump will have no effect. The people actually running the country will still be in place in four years whether you view them as capitalist monsters or technocratic managers. All Western nations are in decline because they are heavily bureaucratized and run by an "educated" layer who have inculcated liberal ideas to an extreme degree, especially the notion of individual rights.
This was observable during the Covid response; mass hysteria, groupthink, a total abandonment of common sense. Importantly, a kind of institutional sneer at ordinary people questioning authority. If anything defines woke it is this authoritarian streak, not hipness or coolness as you imply. No one, for instance, can discuss racial differences, gender differences, or the role of central banks in questionable policies. Woke imposes controls like this that prevent the full expression of ideas that can inform and help all while pretending to care. It is pathetic.
All this has an effect. And the decline and destruction Graham Cunningham writes about is an exploration of these effects which the overwhelming majority can now see themselves; economic decline, ethnic and cultural tensions that did not exist a few decades ago, a plummeting birthrate, lower social cohesion and the emergence of low trust societies in the West, etc etc.
First you calim that: "The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change."
Then you claim that : "The current version of conservatives have morphed into Trumpists and are attempting to destroy everything that holds society together and makes it possible for the poor to exist."
So in one breath the conservatives won't change anything and in the next they are changing the very fabric of society. Can you not see the inherent contradiction that lies at the heart of your argument?
Nice try, but the use of "have always been" negates your explanation, because it includes the present as well as the past. If you wanted to claim that conservatism has morphed then you would have use the phrase "had always been".
Of course the fact is that conservatives have often brought in change. Disraeli long ago noted that conservatives support organic change, that is, change that springs from the mores and customs of the country, not from some utopian theory.
This cast of mind is reflective of how the common law and the law of equity evolved, not through grand theories but through incremental development.
I am increasingly of this view myself. Woke is not a thing imposed so much as an emergent property of Western Liberalism. That said, it doesn't really work and leads to deep failure. So there is that.
I too have been guilty of believing a Machiavellian elite have imposed all this, or at least funded it. But as you allude to, the ideas found fertile ground. Many other funded crackpot ideas have not. There is something in liberalism that appeals.
Personally I think it is emotionally appealing to those averse to thinking. Minimum wages is a simple example. A nice neat declaration you care about the poor and those horrible conservatives banging on about better training are monsters. Much of it may be this. A great deal is simply not questioned; all the examples you listed, global warming, colonialism etc. They are accepted since only the uneducated would reject them. That is certainly whay my own circle are like. People who voted for Brexit are in the same bucket as white supremacist Nazis etc. No thinking required.
I don't think the ideas destroying us have widespread support. But they seem absolutely embraced by the managerial layer actually running the country, and that means guaranteed decline. When I see what otherwise educated people believe, will do, and espouse to others I am at a loss to explain it except brainwashing. Covid taught me most are conformists and I fear it will be no different for all the things that are killing us. They will keep going until we are erased.
“ . . . not Marxism . . . liberal individualism in extreme . . .” is a unique take; very much against the grain - perhaps you’re right. Strange that, after several years, the term/word/concept “woke” is still so hard to define, as is where it came from. Sort of a mental version of the Spanish Flue, hopefully, but I think you are spot on about it not being over. It’s another lesson re human nature.
"a pseudo-intellectual sophistry in the defence of inherent absurdities and a deactivation of whatever native common sense they came in with…"
Wonderfully put! I think it is tied into the false consensus that we have experienced a great leap in evolution. Despite the fact that evolutionary theory is built on the slow process over hundreds of million years, a kind of mass hysteria formed largely since 1900, picking up speed till the present, that we are in the final phases of evolution--that we have arrived at utopia. We are what evolution has been working toward. That we haven't is slow to dawn on us.
Much of our self-image, our narcissism, has been enabled entirely by the story we tell ourselves about our ancestors, invariably pictured as prehuman brutes. The common on-line persona regards even the ancient Greek philosophers as more ignorant than they. They can look down on even on Shakespeare, and the Bible might as well have been written in hieroglyphics and by morons. Anyone who fails to see how smart we are should go back to their cave and draw animals in the dark.
Interesting perspective...and thank you for the compliment.
I think the more mundane example of this phenomenon is the educated classes disdain for trade workers. As uneducated types they are little more than brutes. That's why we must embrace a technocratic panopticon otherwise they'll just keep eating steak and drinking booze.
It is the insufferable arrogance I cannot stand. Our countries are maintained by a class of people hated by the university educated.
Sir, your writing is brilliant. Of course, it helps that I agree with every word you say. However, if it was the antithesis of my beliefs, I would still enjoy your writing because you have an incredible "way with words." Thank you for all you do.
Thank you Mary....that is so heartening!
"Could it be that the massive late 20th Century expansion of tertiary education (that seemed in the 1980s to be progress-on-a-stick) might have actually spread more ignorance than enlightenment?" Great point! And could it be that this design was baked into the educational system from the beginning, as the late John Taylor Gatto made clear in his "Underground History Lesson"? (Available on YouTube)
Particularly since WWII, the social engineers hired by our military intelligence agencies and corporations—Ph.D psychologists, as was outed by the documentary film The Corporation—have been busy shaping the public narrative. They are essentially dutiful acolytes of Edward Bernays, who pointed out in 1929 that those who control the narrative are the de facto rulers of society. This is also known as Fifth Generation warfare, or "psyops." All this is laid out in detail in essential books such as The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot (a history of the CIA), James Corbett's new book Reportage, and Robert Malone's PsyWar.
I believe the social upheavals of the '60s caught them by surprise, and were for the most part genuine. So these agencies realized they had to get ahead of the curve and co-opt future insurgency movements. This they have successfully done with every movement since the '70s, including Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, etc. In some cases they CREATE the "insurgency" movement and then promote it through media and education, which explains the "woke" movement. Gullible youngsters are misled into seeing these movements as cool and progressive, co-opting their natural inclination to rebel against the older generation, with a pre-ordained outlet for their insurgent energies.
Author writes very well, trippingly, what a pleasure; Direct, muscular, spare argumentation, my favourite sort.
Thank you DB
Theodore Dalrymple and Adam Curtis have been making similar points about tertiary education and Edward Bernays respectively for a while now. Both worth reading/watching in my opinion.
Excellent. I hope there is some small bit of good news on one of your items, the tertiary education complex. The good news is that enrollment has declined prior to the demographic cliff, in part because schools have been driving decent people away; consequently fewer people are getting brainwashed.
Yes I agree. Some cautious optimism is perhaps in order just now.
Hopefully your excellent analysis and observations will be consumed by those who need to face reality.
I'm more and more minded to think that woke progressivism is a mutant offshoot of Christianity, or maybe a current Reformation.
Luther begat the late 60s social activist movement begat the Great Awakening revved up during lockdown with the imposition of BLM and Trans Women Are Women credos.
Indeed none other than Tom Holland author of "Dominion" considers our current situation to be a Reformation started in 1968.
If it's true we're naturally selected for belief, or even God created us to find salvation in faith, then woke progressivism ticks both boxes.
What we're seeing maybe for the first time is the vertical radicalisation of traditional faith with the horizontal radicalisation that only the internet could have created.
And as a faith based system so inhabited by the biggest brains in society, where these people are the most easily fooled, the least likely to search their souls and test their thinking, total wishful thinking has been passed down, and side to side, to convert the Enlightenment into creeds that have less substance and truth than astrology and homeopathy.
Throw in the moves to weaponised kindness, unmoored from any objective rules, and you have a deracinated culture that has sucked the energy and humility out of the Enlightenment West.
The ascent of the self-esteem/self-love paradigm (especially in the university-indoctrinated) since the 1980s or thereabouts, is perhaps inversely related to the slow demise of Christian tenets in Western societies. Values such as humility and modesty, which until a few decades ago were just accepted as being "how we behave". As you indicate, the advent of social media has elevated "look at me" culture to the point that incessant bragging and ostentatious behaviour is now seen by the majority as healthy and normal. And "woke" is woven into this hyper-visible gesture culture, so to speak.
Well said indeed, chock full of good, cognitive nourishment......dispiriting to think sometimes that, while indeed there is certainly a 'woke' global techno-managerial elite, tens of millions of one's countrymen blithely, unthinkingly swim in 'woke' waters......
If, as originally intended, woke means to be aware, how does that fit in with your essay? Woke is the contemporary version on "hip" which was the contemporary version if "hep." The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change. The current version of conservatives have morphed into Trumpists and are attempting to destroy everything that holds society together and makes it possible for the poor to exist. The silver lining is that Trump has only 4 yrs. to destroy the social fabric and that's not enough time, unless he goes full fascist, to do that. The Australians, in the recent election vetoed Trumpism and I suspect most of the free world will do the same.
We clearly see things differently George. I am one of those who believe that Western liberal individualism had a wonderful 300 year run but (like all things in the long run) has fallen apart. Why?....because it crashed, like a spoilt kid through all sorts of boundaries....moral, philosophical and spiritual that it failed to comprehend.
All the essays on this Substack argue the case for what I've just said....I can't do better in a single comment.
I have no argument with that. You didn't address anything that I said.
Then I do seem not to have got what was your point...can you bear to have another go?
I am not sure I really understand what you are saying here, especially about individualism. But I am now biased by having read the book by Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual [2014]; further augmented by reading Tom Holland's Dominion [2019]. They assert that the rise of ideas about liberal individualism are derived from the Western Judeo-Christian cultural influences as to how and what bring human means. Clearly other cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have not adopted quite the same outlook [and dare I now add Russia under Putin?].
Perhaps "because it crashed, like a spoilt kid through all sorts of boundaries....moral, philosophical and spiritual that it failed to comprehend...", this deserves another essay addressing this more deeply? I for one would welcome reading that, if properly presented and supported. :-)
This Spectator piece was necessarily short and sweet... but my 4-part Madness of Intelligentsias essay series is - l like to think anyway - that deeper philosophical delve. Can I persuade you to revisit it?
I hope it is not news to you that today "Woke" has been flipped into the derisive term of distain for the idiocy of DEI, critical theory, the racialist industry, and other Progressive [nee communist ] nostrums. As Lorenzo Warby [ https://www.lorenzofromoz.net ] has pointed out on many of his Substack essays, the Progressive mind is always playing with an imagined future where there are no metrics or measures of competence or rational feedback to correct "wrong think". [I find Lorenzo to be especially skilled at "connecting the dots" among various historical, economic, social, and political factoids.]
"The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change. " There may be several versions of "conservative" but at its core conservatives are not against change, just change for change's sake. Their main focus is on reality and prudence. The concept of Chesterton's Fence speaks to this idea, too.
As an American, I won't apologize for Trump's actions, and his core aims to realign the "world order" with a more reserved or "stepped back" role of America, so the rest of the Westernized (sort of democratic) republics and prosperous nations can increase their respective contributions beyond what they have and do still contribute [especially within the Five Eyes community]. I gather the current phrasing is not so much "American First" meaning America alone, as America with even more supportive and responsive and responsible allies. But too many of those allies [5 Eyes and others] have been marinating in Wokeness related ideas for a long time. They also need to recognize their populist political threads are growing and will not be silenced or quashed forever.
I gather our Substack host is simply saying this desired and required transition may not come about as easily or quickly as we impatient Americans might like.
The term woke is claimed to mean awakened by its advocates. However, it is used as an insult by those who observe its real world effect. Open borders and the mixing of alien peoples, the artificial elevation of the less able under the guise of diversity, the castration of boys, the vandalism of European cultures in Europe and North America. None of this is hip; it is destructive. It builds nothing. Therefore most people are not woke in any meaningful sense evenif they appear to go along with it.
Trump will have no effect. The people actually running the country will still be in place in four years whether you view them as capitalist monsters or technocratic managers. All Western nations are in decline because they are heavily bureaucratized and run by an "educated" layer who have inculcated liberal ideas to an extreme degree, especially the notion of individual rights.
This was observable during the Covid response; mass hysteria, groupthink, a total abandonment of common sense. Importantly, a kind of institutional sneer at ordinary people questioning authority. If anything defines woke it is this authoritarian streak, not hipness or coolness as you imply. No one, for instance, can discuss racial differences, gender differences, or the role of central banks in questionable policies. Woke imposes controls like this that prevent the full expression of ideas that can inform and help all while pretending to care. It is pathetic.
All this has an effect. And the decline and destruction Graham Cunningham writes about is an exploration of these effects which the overwhelming majority can now see themselves; economic decline, ethnic and cultural tensions that did not exist a few decades ago, a plummeting birthrate, lower social cohesion and the emergence of low trust societies in the West, etc etc.
Hope that clarifies.
First you calim that: "The conservatives in society have always been afraid of people who are aware because they desire change, and the last thing that conservatives want is change."
Then you claim that : "The current version of conservatives have morphed into Trumpists and are attempting to destroy everything that holds society together and makes it possible for the poor to exist."
So in one breath the conservatives won't change anything and in the next they are changing the very fabric of society. Can you not see the inherent contradiction that lies at the heart of your argument?
In one breath you fail to see that I was comparing conservatives of the past to conservatives of the present.
Nice try, but the use of "have always been" negates your explanation, because it includes the present as well as the past. If you wanted to claim that conservatism has morphed then you would have use the phrase "had always been".
Of course the fact is that conservatives have often brought in change. Disraeli long ago noted that conservatives support organic change, that is, change that springs from the mores and customs of the country, not from some utopian theory.
This cast of mind is reflective of how the common law and the law of equity evolved, not through grand theories but through incremental development.