Wokeness: When worldviews waver

Ten years ago, hardly anyone knew what identity politics actually meant. In the meantime, their representatives have achieved considerable gains in the so-called Kulturkampf. How to talk about something, with which vocabulary and which premises, is increasingly decided by an educated minority. The social coercion that comes with this sovereignty over discourse has undoubtedly done a lot of good. The inhibition threshold for discriminatory actions and speech has probably never been higher. But not only since the discussion about postcolonialism that flared up again during the war in the Middle East has identity politics been on the defensive.

In the volume “Canceln,” published a year ago by Hanser-Verlag, “Zeit” columnist Ijoma Mangold said that since the “Woken” had a name as representatives of this new discursive morality, they had become vulnerable for the first time. As Mangold writes, they previously acted from cover. For example, they liked to claim that there is no “cancel culture” and that their vilified statements were nothing other than civil society commitment. This game of hide-and-seek is now over, as representatives of certain interests and bearers of specific attitudes have been identified as “woke”. If they feel misunderstood by this insult, they only share the fate of all those who were previously disqualified by themselves as right-wingers, as “Terfs” or as “old white men.”

For a more traditional left that prioritizes economic justice over issues of representation, this is good news. Probably no other political camp has suffered so much from the Woken’s success, as they also claim the left-wing term for themselves and deny it to those who are more interested in the minimum wage than in pronouns or gender asterisks. Progress, the left-wing project par excellence, occurred rapidly among the Woken, while the economically oriented left seemed to live in the past. Susan Neiman is now fighting back and of course her polemic has the new fighting term in the title: “Left is not woke” is the name of the book with which the philosopher and director of the Potsdam Einstein Forum wants to separate what, according to her, does not belong together.

According to Neiman, a commitment to universalism is essential for a true left, that is, a program that benefits all people and therefore fights for the community and the general. Such an agenda is in fact incompatible with an identity politics that, on the contrary, insists on the border and its insurmountability, which is why Neiman sniffs and dismisses it as “tribalism” or “tribalism” and thus assigns it to outdated epochs. In fact, supporters of postcolonialism problematize the Enlightenment, i.e. the decisive intellectual resource of modernity, because it promoted global exploitation or motivated it in the first place.

Neiman goes to some lengths to dispel this suspicion and presents quotes from Kant and Diderot as evidence. But she cannot win the dispute because the Kant critics also have perfectly racist passages up their sleeves. In any case, the attempt to reduce what is probably the most momentous revolution in thought since ancient Greece to the categories of guilty or innocent is a rather helpless undertaking.

The woke people are kidding themselves if they think they can say goodbye to the Enlightenment, ignore it or forget it. But Neiman is also caught in a misunderstanding. If students refuse to read Kant because they have discovered racist passages from his work on social media screenshots, then they do not understand him – like Neiman – as a thinker and pioneer of modernity, but as a very concrete political figure. The potential for controversy between Neiman as a classical intellectual and the Woken evaporates the moment one recognizes that the latter have a primarily rhetorical interest in philosophy and that content is only relevant to them as long as it can be useful for their political argument . This does not mean that there is no point in engaging with them, but rather that it is a waste of time to insist on intellectual-historical correctness towards them.

This wouldn’t be expected from Julie Burchill anyway, as she is better known for bold expletives. The British journalist comes from the punk movement, wrote as a teenager for the “New Musical Express”, later for left-wing and sometimes also for conservative newspapers about films, fashion, feminism and now most of all about the Woken, which she also follows The most recent book is dedicated to: “Welcome to the Woke Tribunals”. In it, she accuses what she calls the “Woke Bros.”, among other things, of justifying genital mutilation as a legitimate practice in another culture, of encouraging minors to change their gender, and of giving men an excuse to “play with their cocks” in women’s locker rooms. .

Burchill’s relentless stance against trans activists and Islam, among other things, is reminiscent of Alice Schwarzer and the reasons why she is now so poorly regarded in left-wing and online feminist circles. Unlike Schwarzer, she uses a coarse and insulting tone of voice for her arguments, probably to justify her own authority as a member of the working class.

Their attacks on the Woken can therefore also be understood as a defense of a specific culture in which a young, academic left is extremely strange if they show any interest in it at all. In a sense, Burchill is engaging in identity politics himself. »Because of my background, I never had to make an effort not to be racist; I’d never thought about it enough to care about it – it’s for people who have time, people who go to university.” The Woken’s dedicated anti-racism, her self-questioning and constant distrust of others are not hers just strange, but also suspicious.

The dispute between alt-left “boomers” and wonks is also a generational conflict. The elders lead him so relentlessly because they fear for their worldview. And the aggressiveness of young people may also stem from the fact that in many Western societies they have so little influence institutionally due to demographic developments, which makes them appear even more decisive in other areas.

Apart from that, the older leftists themselves are of course to blame for the fact that progressive forces are no longer primarily committed to social justice, as their mothers and fathers have already given up hope for such justice without a fight, like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and others Gerhard Schröder let go of political influence on the economy and sold it as a modern, fair project. It is telling how uninterested Neiman and Burchill are in the question of why woke thinking has spread so effortlessly. One might get the idea that they wanted to use their vehement resistance to distract attention from the failures of their own generation.

Susan Neiman: Left is not woke. Ad American. English v. Christiana Goldmann, Hanser Berlin, 176 pages, hardcover, €22.
Julie Burchill: Welcome to the Woke Tribunals: How #Idenity Is Destroying Progressive Politics. Ad English v. Christoph Hesse, Edition Tiamat, 376 pages, br., 34 €.