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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. One issue that strongly mars Neiman’s book is that she sees evolutionary psychology as deeply inimical to Leftism and to progress. She argues that evolutionary psychology, in the end, attributes selfish motivations to everything that people do, and that not only hinders moral progress (for everyone’s out for themselves), but gets rid of progress made possible by appealing to the interests of humanity as a whole instead of just your personal well being. SN: The problem is that you can make the same relativist claim about “indigenous” customs and traditions that are even worse, like Female Genital Mutilation. Someone like Narendra Modi is a perfect example of the misuse of such post-colonial rhetoric and claims about indigeneity. Yes, human rights were originally formalized as a concept in Europe, though versions of them exist in other cultures. But for all of the very real harms of British colonialism in South Asia, do we really want to say it was wrong for them to protest and to forbid suttee (the burning of widows)?

Kant’s search for universal values led him not toward notions of European superiority but away from them. Alex Chambers:You got interested in thinking about these big questions through the existentialists, but then went to school and started studying with, sort of, some of the great philosophers of their time. Maybe no longer our time. And so, to a certain degree it was those early experiences that then connected with your interest in understanding these thinkers of the Enlightenment.To virtually all left-wing public intellectuals, Okun’s work is a joke. But it is quite plausibly more influential within the progressive firmament than more sophisticated and respectable racial-justice advocacy. Okun’s work has been used in trainings for school administrators in New York City, and recommended by the National Education Association, the Minnesota Public Health Association, the Los Angeles chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and the Society of Conservation Biologists, among many other left-wing institutions. Susan Neiman: For the last two years I’ve been sitting with friends in many different countries who would bring up—but quietly and only among friends—some incidents of woke overreach or somebody being canceled for ridiculous reasons, and these people would tell me, morosely, “I guess I’m not Left anymore.” But at a certain point I begin to say: no, they are the ones who are not left anymore, the woke crowd. So I wanted to break down this binary between the so-called woke Left and the Right, untangle the confusion and reclaim certain positions for the Left, such as universalism and belief in moral progress. The shortest version of my argument is that wokeism, while fueled by all kinds of progressive emotions, such as sympathy for the underdog and indignation on the part of the marginalized, ends up with very reactionary ideas. Foucault’s critique of modernity, while it has long been criticized for robbing individuals of agency and leading to cynicism or even despair, was not merely an academic one. The philosopher was himself a committed political activist deeply involved in the French prison-reform movement. And his conception of normative power has had a profound influence on generations of activists on both sides of the Atlantic, for whom his analysis provides a language and a strategy for confronting those in power, those who might tell you that your demands are unreasonable and dismiss your actions as irrational. SN: That’s a reductionary view of Marxism, though I should say that I’m a socialist but not a Marxist. For a few reasons, but mainly because Marx was a class reductionist, at least in his later writings. In the 19th century that sort of made sense, but it’s a ridiculous way to divide people up in the 21st century. People don’t only do things based on their class interest, to put it mildly. Marx was proven wrong from two sides: by the millions of middle-class people who supported socialism, not because of their class interest but because of a sense of justice; and by the millions of working-class people who continued to vote for reactionary interests.

Alex Chambers:Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. I had seen it in your book that you feel in love with the two of them. What about their work made you decide you needed to be a philosopher? But Telluride’s brand of liberalism had long evolved with the times. And when Lloyd returned to teach its high-school summer program in 2022, he found that the association’s “anti-racism workshops” were indoctrinating students into a bleak, identitarian dogma that resembled Neiman’s pejorative conception of wokeness. As Lloyd writes: Susan Neiman:Bryan Stephenson, one of my heroes, says, you know, "Nobody should be reduced to the worst thing they ever did." And my question is, why do we wanna be reduced to the worst thing that ever happened to us? A rather fascinating finding is that ‘One in five One Nation voters (22%) would describe themselves as woke.’ One Nation is a right wing party known for advocating low immigration and opposing Aboriginal self determination. SN: I’ve only had one review from a conservative who wrote something along the lines of: “You have to wade through a lot of leftist bullshit to get there, but she makes some good points.” It’s pretty clear that I’m not being instrumentalized by the Right.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. MB: Would you agree that the rise of the alt-Right is partly driven by wokeism? Are both factions driving each other crazy? Though Foucault did speak of the suffering of incarcerated criminals, the claim that he was seriously involved in prison reform is highly debatable. I’m not the first scholar to argue that his theoretical discussion of incarceration undermines the possibility of prison reform, but I do cite the testimony of disappointed French prison reformers, whose concerns Foucault dismissed as trivial (p. 101). “Burn it all down” is not a strategy for social change. The best testament to the latter tendency may be the prevalence of a document titled “ the characteristics of white supremacy culture” in progressive institutions. That pamphlet, created by Tema Okun, the co-leader of the Teaching for Equity Fellows Program at Duke University, posits that valuing “objectivity” or conducting work with “a sense of urgency” are definitionally white, and therefore, that expecting nonwhite people to share these tendencies constitutes a form of white supremacy.

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