I'm not religious by a long shot, but lately I've been thinking of something I read in college. I took a few religion courses as an undergraduate, and this from the Bible stood out: By their works, ye shall know them.* I didn't think very deeply about it then, but I do now.
Over the years I'd become dissatisfied by some of the discourse in leftist spaces, but I couldn't put my finger on the cause. I hadn't changed many of my core beliefs; I was still pro-choice and pro-union, still believed in Medicare-for-All, and I still wanted to tax the hell out of the rich and on the right day I still thought maybe we should devour them and pick our teeth with their bones. And I wasn't becoming sympathetic to the likes of Andrew Sullivan, who can kiss my liberal gay ass. (Unless he'd enjoy that, in which case, he can't.) So I started reading and listening to people I disagree with, to test my beliefs. Most of those beliefs stood the test, and were the stronger for being questioned. I then realized that my dissatisfaction had nothing to do with specific beliefs, but with values.
I've been a liberal as long as I can remember, and have always gravitated towards people who were misfits, and towards interests--music, literature, film--that existed on the margins. For me, being liberal meant questioning what cannot be questioned, and never accepting anything just because someone says so. Curiosity, empiricism, tolerance for disagreement, diversity, and fairness--these were the philosophical foundations upon which my specific beliefs were built. I started to perceive that a few on the left, a very few, just didn't share those values. They didn't care about fairness, curiosity, or empiricism. These folks and I shared many of the same sympathies, but our philosophies couldn't be further apart. I call these folks woke, and while I am sure there are better terms, I'll stick with this for now.
These wokeists reminded me of nothing so much as the religious right of the 80s and 90s. They were in touch with Ultimate Truth, and those who disagreed with their conclusions weren't just wrong; they were evil. Problematic is the sanitized term we now use, but growing up gay I knew the taste of condemnation no matter how it was sweetened. That's when I realized that wokeness is a religion, with highly defined doctrines, a specific language for discussing those doctrines, a way of punishing the faithful who stray, and no sense of humor about any of it.
There are certainly woke doctrines: identitarian deference, believing victims, and intersectionality. The language used to discuss woke philosophy is arcane and impenetrable:
We must be sure not to infringe on anyone's ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources, lest we hinder any contribution to knowledge production. We should always remember our own positionality and contextual normativity.
Liberals who blaspheme are punished by Internet shunning and pile-ons, or are caricatured, in No-True-Scotsman fashion, as conservatives. As I have learned recently, poking fun at any of this is literally killing people.
The irony is that I often agree with the tenets of wokeism. I do think that the intersection of identities can produce unique experiences of discrimination. I agree that unexamined privilege can blind one to the experiences and oppression of others. And I am a strong proponent of trying to do better today than I did yesterday. The problem is when those ideas become dogma, which is never nuanced, and cannot be questioned or contextualized. Once you question this dogma, your specific opinions no longer merit consideration.
Like me, wokeists stand on the left, but we don't find the same values there. Obviously, they can believe whatever they want, but when those beliefs come to resemble religion...well, if I wanted doctrines set in stone, I'd be a conservative.
I'm taking the left to task pretty hard here, but I don't apologize. It's true that I rarely criticize conservatives this way, because it's pointless. Troglodytes are gonna trog, but I expect better from progressives. I don't know just when wokeness took over so much of liberal discourse, but I think it's past time we woke up. Religion doesn't have to involve a god, or an afterlife; it just has to work like religion. Wokeness, by your works, I now know ye.
*I am probably getting this not quite right but I'm a gay, liberal atheist so what do you want?
