The Roots Of Wokeness - The Weekly Dish

critical theory... reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s... changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy...

Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning... postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture... reason... is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power ... objective truth... is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional ...

1980s and 1990s... Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power... seeing that power used against ... oppressed identity groups... “applied postmodernism”... hardened into ... Social Justice ... There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview ...

some critics call this ... neo-Marxism... switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in favor of various oppressed group identities... individuals only exist ... where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence ... An assertion of individuality = attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression... instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown ... no incremental inclusion ... into a pluralist, liberal unified project... [just] the oppressors and the oppressed...

science has no claim on objective truth, because science itself is a cultural construct ...

we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be “woke” is to be “awake” to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses...

no ... persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason ...

diversity at the New York Times, say, has nothing to do with a diversity of ideas... a function of oppression. What matters is a diversity of identities that can all express the same idea: that liberalism is a con-job... why almost every NYT op-ed ... left-leaning magazine reads exactly alike... An oppressed person’s word is always the last one ... to ask questions about it, is a form of oppression ... of linguistic violence...

liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world ... critical theory cannot include liberalism... views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy ...

the success of liberalism ... non-zero-sum pluralism ... rattles the critical theorists the most ... suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better ...