Woke Culture—Oxymoron

Woke Culture is Cancellation Culture. Cancellation Culture is Woke Culture. And Cancellation Culture is ancient.

Proposition: Folks to whom the phrase “individual rights” means something that could fill volumes would recognize Toby Young and James Delingpole as two of the good guys.  For folks who have not been acquainted with their opus, I’d recommend the always-engaging London Calling podcast as a good place to start.

One of themes that makes the podcast work is, as Delingpole might put, the prospect of “mummy and daddy” finessing a “fight”.

Over-simply and irresponsibly: One half of the motivation for the “fighting” seems to be Delingpole’s perception that much (all?) of the nonsense of our Woke Age really is engineered and orchestrated by Illuminati-types.  Many of these people will have just this last weekend descended on their great shrine at Davos.  The other half seems to be the fact that Young engages with the Woke Crowd with magnanimity.

Who does not appreciate a magnanimous soul?  Everyone does—right?—except for those folks who would have that same magnanimous soul crucified.  It’s been done before.

Young exhibited some of that magnanimity in his 12-minute presentation to the Oxford Union on “the terror tactics of the Woke Left.”  His fundamental proposition seemed to be that the Woke Left might aspire to all types of good stuff (such as? …), but it’s mechanical appeal to “cancellation” is self-defeating.  He illuminated his point by arguing that the Woke Left had lost the public on “gender” issues.

The presentation made some contact with the question of what “Woke Culture” is—or is not.  I would suggest two things.  First, Woke Culture is Cancellation Culture; a Culture of Cancellation is Woke Culture.  Second, a Culture of Cancellation is not a modern phenomenon.  Societies have had their gods and cults.  And most of those societies have perished.  They’ve perished, because other societies annihilated them.

That second point makes for big proposition, but, for now, I am just going to illuminate one data point.  In his contribution to the edited volume, The God that Failed (1951), the committed communist Ignazio Silone observed that other committed communists were not interested in debate.  “What struck me most about the Russian Communists,” he observed,

even in such exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own. The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling.  An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists… To find a comparable infatuation one has to go back to the Inquisition. (Emphasis in the original.)

Lenin himself had been explicit about canceling people.  In an essay titled “Democratic Socialism—Oxymoron?,” I suggested that “one does not have to look too hard to discern Lenin’s attitude about how to deal with the proponents of inconvenient opinions.”

His strategy was not to endeavor to bring such people to his view or to agree-to-disagree but rather to “destroy” these people, to get them canceled. And you do that by getting the mass of other people to adopt your view.  Whether they believe in your view or not is another matter. Bullying them in to going along with it, and thereby isolating those willing to advance contrary views, achieves the result. Does this not sound familiar?

Familiar, indeed.  Surely one could pull some passages from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) that align with cancellation.  Rules for Radicals is a manual for canceling people.  And there is nothing sophisticated about it.  There is nothing to over-intellectualize here.  Cancellation amounts to the most primitive, accessible mode of (non-) engagement.  Not engaging is what people do.