Cooking Up Social Justice: How Activist Scholars Cooked up Wokeness in Academia.

Explaining what Critical Social Justice (AKA woke) activists believe can be very difficult. Part of the reason for this is that wokeness pulls so many ideas from so many different thinkers that to the average person wokeness looks like a pile of contradictions. It can be difficult for the typical person to make sense of wokeness precisely because many of the ideas that wokeness uses appear to contradict each other: They claim to be anti-racist but they focus intensely on race. They claim to be on favor of womens’ rights, but their definition of “woman” includes people who have male genitalia. They say not to force your views on them, and then demand everyone accept their worldview and ideology. Given all of this the average person looks at wokeness and often wonders “how can anyone make sense of this?”

Part of the reason why wokeness can make use of all these seemingly contradictory ideas is that wokeness is in largely based on philosophical postmodernism. That is, wokeness uses postmodern standards rather then the standards of reason, rationality and formal logic of the enlightenment liberal tradition of rationality. This means the academic environment in which wokeness developed made use of different academic and intellectual standards than most of us are used to. The reason for this is that wokeness developed in humanities departments in Universities. In Critical Race Theory, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, English literature, Fine arts, Postcolonialism, Queer Theory, and a host of other disciplines activist scholars were all making use of postmodern ideas. Most of this occurred during the 80’s and 90’s as wokeness was being incubated in higher education. The result is that there was an entire ecosystem of academic postmodernism that was working toward what we now call wokeness.

Writing in the New York Review of Books the political Philosopher Mark Lilla described this environment by saying that the environment of Academic postmodernism:

“is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and postcolonial theory. Academic postmodernism is nothing if not syncretic, which makes it difficult to understand or even describe. It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva—and, as if that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures from the German Frankfurt School. Given the impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.”¹

The point here is that wokeness comes out of an environment of academic postmodernism in which ideas from all over the spectrum of academic disciplines were fused together, not because they fit together intellectually, but because they were useful for the political goals of activist scholars. These Activist scholars were not disinterested academics trying to seek truth in as neutral a way as they could manage, these were political activists who were seeking to assemble a set of ideas that they could use to achieve their social and political goals.

The way to think about the academic development of postmodernism is like this:

Typical academic disciplines work by seeking truth, and then using the facts that have been established to attempt to build true theories which explain how the world works. The result of that is each development in disciplines like physics, math, logic, engineering, technology, philosophy, and biology proceeds by studying the world and attempting to describe it accurately. Then, using the facts which can be established intellectuals seek to correct past errors and create better and better explanations of how the world works. It’s a lot like building a building, there is a foundation that is built on the enlightenment liberal tradition of rationality, and each generation adds to the work that has been done by the previous generations. Using reason, logic, and evidence careful academics go about correcting mistakes, eliminating past errors, and developing knowledge so that each generation gets a picture of the world which is more detailed and higher resolution then the previous generation. The process is not perfect, nor is it linear; there are starts and stops as old errors are discovered and need to be corrected, but that is the general shape of what is going on.

The academics who developed Critical Social Justice (AKA wokeness) were operating in a different way. The feminist Kelly Oliver wrote ““feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories, not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories.”² So the goal of her theorizing is not aimed at truth, it is aimed at overcoming oppression. In other words, the goal is social justice, not objective truth.

As such these academic activist scholars are not like builder building a building, attempting to build true theories on a strong foundation of truth. They are like activists cooks in an intellectual kitchen cooking up theories that help them achieve their political aims. You can imagine a chef of wokeness saying “take a cup of Marx, add two cups Frankfurt School, A gallon of Foucault, add 10 ounces of Derrida, a pinch of Gramsci, bake in the universities for two decades and then you get a delicious stew of wokeness! Yum Yum!” This is how wokeness developed.

Now, the question remains “how do these academic activists resolve all the apparent contradictions?” This is a question that deserves it’s own essay. However, a brief answer is twofold. First, the ideas are repeatedly re-theorised in a way that allows them to be put together so they can be used to achieve their political aims. The second is that because wokeness makes heavy use of a postmodern view of the world, judge their ideas with postmodern standards. Since their main standard is “is this idea useful in our struggle to achieve our vision of social justice?” they will often judge the validity of an idea by how useful it is for them to achieve their aims, rather then by the traditional standards of reason, logic, and evidence. As such they tend not to concern themselves with meeting the standards of the enlightenment liberal tradition of rationality which they reject.

In practice this often appears to the average person as different standards in different situations and appeals to different theories depending on what is useful at the time, refusal to engage on fair terms, changing the rules of debate, and making use of language games and shifting definitions. As frustrating as this may be, it is important to remember that from within their own system this all makes perfect sense and there is a logic to what they are doing.

The way to combat this is to make sure we always make sure that in every debate with a social justice advocate we assert the importance of clear arguments and objective truth. Have the conversation on the ground of objective truth rather than interests, biases, and feelings. Every time it looks like there is a contradiction, a shift in terms, or some other move, we must ask them to get clear about exactly what they mean and then measure their statements against the standard of objective truth.

If we do this well, we can push back in a way that is both persuasive and effective.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_Distance.

1. Mark Lilla, The Politics of Jacques Derrida, New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998

2. Kelly Oliver, Keller's Gender/Science System: Is the Philosophy of Science to Science as Science Is to Nature? Hypatia , Winter, 1989, Vol. 3, No. 3. p.146