Left Is Not Woke

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MB: Would you agree that the rise of the alt-Right is partly driven by wokeism? Are both factions driving each other crazy? SN: I see how you could use it that way. But first of all let me ask the question. When you say “Take the mind of a hunter-gatherer two million years ago,” how have you taken that mind? How has anybody? I have to admit that this was the part of my book that I was the least certain of, so I asked my friend Philip Kitcher, who has written at least two books on evolutionary psychology, to read it and please tell me where I got things wrong. He made a couple of minor suggestions, but he thought that I got the heart of the thing right. Evolutionary psychology is the biggest example of a pseudoscience that ever became so respectable. But they have zero sources to go on. Yes, evolution works slowly, but we don’t have access to the mind of a hunter gatherer. We can look at their bones and various archaeological relics, but talk about their minds is sheer speculation. And even if we knew what our ancestors were thinking two million years ago, we have absolutely no reason to believe that we have the same drives and motivations as they do, because in the intervening two million years cultures have also evolved.

MB: In a similar way, non-white people who don’t toe to the party line, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali or John McWhorter, are being dismissed as “race traitors” or “Uncle Toms.” We both agree that “protofascists” around the world represent a true threat. Whether it is best to oppose them by demanding conformity, debating first principles, or simply doing the hard work of coalition building, I leave to you to decide. Susan Neiman:But I should first say that my life was deeply changed in 1982 when I thought that I was going to spend a year in Berlin as a Fulbright fellow and wound up saying things like, "There's more philosophy in any bar in Berlin than I ever met at Harvard." this was obviously an exaggeration. I was an angry 27 year old. But the truth is, there was something about Berlin in particular, I suppose, I mean, in Europe in general, it's still true, it's not just in Sartre and Beauvoir's days. There's a lot of public thinking going on, it's subsidized infrastructure. People do go to plays, but they also, they go to talks and discussions and stuff. Just what people do. There's great public radio all the time, you know. Huge numbers of different radio programs, television, politicians, at least from some parties, the Social Democrats really like doing public discussions with philosophers. I mean, like the President of the country or the chancellor of the country. I mean, this is a thing in Germany which is very hard to imagine in the States. And I suppose other than many things I don't like about Germany, that's one of the things I do like very much.

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If you're woke, you're left. If you're left, you're woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you're one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake. Susan Neiman:And, I mean, I have to be very clear about this. The Germans after the war did not initially want to do any form of atonement at all. In fact, one of the insights that I had when I was working on this material was, they sounded exactly like defenders of the lost cause. Germans, particularly west Germans in the early decades after the war would say things like, "Well, we lost the war and our cities were in ruins and ashes." And, "We lost seven million citizens and our men were in POW camps and we were hungry, just barely alive." That's a citation, I don't know if anybody will recognize it, but there was a moment when I was driving on the highway in the States and Joan Baez "Is the Night they Drove Old Dixie Down" came on the radio and I thought, Baez sang in Selma when white people were getting killed in Selma. Baez was not just virtue signaling, she was on the right side when there was a cause to be on the right side and she is singing a hymn to the confederacy. It's a beautiful song, but I started imagining, what if I were singing, you know, The Night They Drove The Wehrmacht Down? You know?

Neiman’s sensitivity to these fallacies derives partly from her own identity as a Jewish critic of Israel. Apologists for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians incessantly seek to invalidate reasoned arguments with invocations of historical trauma and ill-substantiated allegations of hateful bias. And in many cases, their basic position is affirmed by all major Jewish American organizations and the most identitarian Jewish activists. But it does not follow from this that there is one essentially Jewish perspective on the occupation of the West Bank, let alone that rejecting the dominant perspective among Jewish organizations and activists is inherently antisemitic. Left-of-center critics of wokeness, meanwhile, tend to have a narrower target in mind. Mainstream liberals sometimes use it to denote an extreme or illiberal turn in progressive political culture since the Obama years, while some socialists deploy it to deride the superficial moralism of virtue-signaling corporations. Still, such critiques often fail to make clear where progressive politics ends and the “woke” variety begins. MB: But let’s assume you’re right that evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience. Still, the biggest opponents of evolutionary psychology are the woke crowd. They absolutely hate it.

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Theresa May, Britain’s fourth-most-recent prime minister, has a book to sell. In a recent interview, the former Conservative leader declared herself “woke and proud.” In The Abuse of Power, she cites an Oxford English Dictionary definition of woke as being “well-informed, up to date and chiefly alert to racial discrimination and injustice.” She told her interviewer: “And on that basis, who would not want to be woke?” Susan Neiman:Bryan Stephenson, one of my heroes, says, you know, "Nobody should be reduced to the worst thing they ever did." And my question is, why do we wanna be reduced to the worst thing that ever happened to us?