Yesterday I read a lengthy piece on The Origins of Wokeness. Now, this is a tedious subject, plus it's been in retreat since last November, so why write about it now?
Well, I'm between books at the moment, so I have nothing else to write about. Besides, what is the best in life? Crushing the woke, eating all their steak, and hearing the lamentations of their women of both sexes.
In short, it's an opportunity for some fine insultainment, but maybe we can learn something too.
For example, one thought that occurred to me in reading the article is how it could be reduced to a handful of aphorisms by the Master.
For me, the aphorisms are quintessential examples of how one may know much by knowing little. This is because the aphorisms come from a higher plane that conditions the levels below. They are simultaneously concentrated and expansive.
Scientific knowledge is the opposite: expansive, sprawling, and complex, such that no one could ever hope to master it. Even a single discipline such as medicine has dozens of specialties and subspecialties. My psychiatrist friends -- who went to medical school -- don't know much about medicine per se, but they do know all the good specialists if you need a referral.
The point is, the mind seeks unity, which is at the top of the vertical hierarchy. Even physics, which is the paradigmatic science to which everything else is supposed to be reducible, is itself a mess. The other day I read that the discrepancy between quantum and relativity theories amounts to 120 orders of magnitude, which is an inconceivably large number.
Gemini rates my statement more or less true: that "This is a major problem in physics, highlighting the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity," although there are disagreements as to exactly how vast the divergence. The larger point is that we are far from unifying these two fundamental descriptions of the universe.
Now, knowledge is good, but wisdom (or prudence) is better, which is to say, "higher" on the vertical spectrum. Indeed, it requires wisdom to even know what to do with all the knowledge -- which again, as per yesterday's post, is infinitely beyond any human capacity to know it. The two -- wisdom and knowledge -- exist in a kind of complementary and dynamic relationship, like principles and entailments.
Which is why There are rules!
Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends (Hayek).
The fundamental error of the social justice warriors is that the rules do not and cannot guarantee any specific outcome. Hayek compares the free society to a game which consists "partly of skill and partly of chance":
It proceeds, like all games, according to the rules guiding the actions of individual participants whose aims, skills, and knowledge are different, with the consequence that the outcome will be unpredictable and that there will regularly be winners and losers (ibid.).
So while it is right to insist that "nobody cheats, it would be nonsensical to demand that the results for the different players be just." If a hitter in baseball strikes out a lot, we don't therefore change the rules and allow him four strikes instead of three. But this is precisely what DEI does: different rules for officially designated victim groups. In short, legally sanctioned cheating.
The article linked above characterizes wokeness as
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
Which is to say, a focus on preferred outcomes instead of transparent and consistently applied rules. Thus, it is the rule of the ruleless, or law of the lawless, in which case
orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.
Virtue is playing by the rules. Wokeness is overruling the rules -- as in Biden's recent unilateral declaration of a new amendment to the constitution.
The author of the piece traces the rise of wokeness to the 1960s, especially in the universities, and more particularly in the humanities and social sciences. By the 2010s it had become "more virulent":
It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.
A wider variety of sins, identified and punished by people who would be the first to deny the existence of sin and dismiss it as the relic of a superstitious age:
What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.
Which brings to mind another aphorism:
Only the Church considers itself a congregation of sinners. All other communities, religious or lay, feel themselves to be a confraternity of saints.
However,
Christianity did not invent the notion of sin, but that of forgiveness.
Nor does it ask that we be impeccable but that we be eager to be forgiven.
But wokeness is an unforgiving counter-religion, "with God replaced by protected classes." The real God harmonizes justice and mercy, but the god of the sinless and saintly woke is all social justice and no mercy.
Let's get back to the related principles of wisdom and unity. Clearly, there can be no unity in a society in which there are different rules for different groups. Rather, unity can only be a function of agreement on the nature of the rules. We can't play the game if we can't first agree on the rules, and agree to abide by them.
But there is a deeper principle involved, which can only be a function of wisdom -- the wisdom that says All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, whereby we are free to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we play by the rules.
Thanks Cap'n Obvious.
I suppose this post is rather banal, but then again,
We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.
Moreover,
Strictly speaking, it is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization consists.
So,
The conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day.
The stupidity of our day being progressive wokeness.
Now,
The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.
Which is why
In certain eras the intelligence has to devote itself merely to restoring definitions.
Definitions to words like man, woman, freedom, equality, justice, fairness, reason, fascism, racism, and the rule of law.
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