ooking around the cultural landscape today, I conclude that we are in the midst of a sort of negative religious revival: let's call it America's First Great Awokening.
Evidence of our society's wokeness—a false awakening sparked by political grievance—is all around. I'd like to begin with what the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa called the “coincidence of opposites.” Unpacking exactly what Cusa meant by that arresting phrase would take us into the thickets of metaphysical speculation. But we see pedestrian examples of that strange coincidence everywhere. Indeed, one of the great tests of our wokeness is the extent to which many things have mutated into their opposites—not awake but awoke. Inversion is a dominant principle of our social life.
Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.
There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.
The eighteenth-century German aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg observed, “Nowadays we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance.” Doubtless Lichtenberg thought he was being clever. How astonished he would have been to discover that he was a prophet, not a satirist.
Surely many of you have heard about the Twitter sensation Titania McGrath [about whom we had more to say in these pages in our April and May 2019 issues]. She is the author of many extravagant woke pronouncements. Item: “If you don't think exactly the same way as me, then you've clearly got a lot to learn about diversity.” Satire? Or bulletin from the front?
The world recently learned that Titania's real name is Andrew and that all those woke observations were in jest. A certain amount of hilarity ensued. But the serious point is this: McGrath's sly tweets are indistinguishable from what is actually, seriously being propagated today in academia—and not only in academia. The mantra is “Diversity.” The reality is strictly enforced conformity about any ideas that might disturb the heavy moral slumber of wokeness.
And here's an irony: when the free speech movement started at Berkeley's Sproul Hall in 1964, it was a left-wing movement that demanded tolerance and challenged conventional behavior and mores. Today the Left espouses the opposite—not tolerance and free speech but conformity and censorship.
Acouple of years ago at Encounter Books, I was proud to publish The Demon in Democracy by the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko. A prominent theme in that book is the persistence of totalitarian impulses in putatively liberal societies. Just a few weeks ago, as if to illustrate that thesis, Middlebury College suddenly rescinded an invitation to Mr. Legutko to speak. Why? Because a handful of student snowflakes decided that Mr. Legutko's ideas were not in perfect harmony with their own.
Middlebury, of course, is the institution that covered itself in shame two years ago when protestors there loudly and violently prevented the social scientist Charles Murray from speaking and then, in the resulting melee, sent a female faculty member to the hospital. And here's the kicker: Middlebury is not some wacko exception. On the contrary, its malignant embrace of woke identity politics is the rule in the American educational establishment, and, increasingly, in the American workplace.
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