May 08, 2023

Defining "woke"

Laura Halls is a "gender-fluid" Leftist writer with a substantial following online.  As a good academic I like to define my terms so I was pleased to see her define "woke".  I never use the term myself but many do.

I first came acros the term in commentary from South Africa -- where it was used to describe black dissatisfaction with the racial realities in SA.  A woke black wanted to reduce the advantages that whites enjoy.  He saw nothing inevitable or right about the current situation and wanted to change it

The term is now used worldwide but still seems to denote a belief in injustice and a desire to rectify it.  And Laura Halls agrees.  So let us lok at her definition and note the problem with it:

Simply I would define woke to be aware of societal injustices and forms of oppression. These examples of oppression would obviously apply to things like racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. Woke means that there is an acknowledgment of the ways our societies and institutions have worked and do still work the disadvantage certain groups and outright brutalize them in many cases.

Obviously, the implication of woke is thus that these institutions of oppression need to be dismantled and that these forms of oppression need to be addressed and corrected

She goes on to say how evil conservatives are for not wanting to "correct" the injustices.

But the fault in her thinking is something very characteristic of the Left. The fault lies in her word "Obviously".  

She has clearly read little or nothing of conservstive writing.  She fails to see that there is nothing  obvious about social problems and their solutions.  She rather arrogantly thinks that the only reason why conservtives obstruct the reforms she wants lies in a general conservative aversion to change.  She is obvlivious that there might be more complex reasons to oppose a particular change.  She accuses conservatives of simplistic thinking when that is in fact her problem

If she had read almost anything from conservative writers, she would know that consrvatives normally give REASONS for opposing Leftist policies. They do not just oppose Leftist policies reflexively.  As Leibnitz said long ago, they consider that they might live in the best of all possible worlds. That is not a serious proposal but the reality behind it is that many good things have bad side effects and many bad things can  have a desirable side. So in dismantling something bad you might destroy something good.  And conservatives do consider that.  Leftist proposals generally seem at first sight desirable but a conservative will look for downsides to it. He/she will ask where the balance lies.  And often the bad consequences of a Leftist policy will tend to rule it out.

A very well-known example is communism. To many, communism seems OBVIOUSLY desirable: "From each according to their ability and to each according to their need". But the downside of implementing that is that it tends to generate murderous tyrannies. So anyone who is genuinely concerned for human welfare would rule it out. "Heartless" capitalism is surely better

So Laura's proposals sound reasonable at first but in reality are attractive only to shallow thinkers like her.  She really should try to understand why problems exist before proposing solutions to them.  And that applies to woke people generally. They are in fact in important ways asleep

https://aninjusticemag.com/defining-woke-and-right-wing-opposition-to-it-b0b1a5d26b07

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TONGUE-TIED,
EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL,
GREENIE WATCH,
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH,
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and
IMMIGRATION WATCH.

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