Wokeism? What is it? Is it a force for good, for bad? Is it political correctness gone mad? Is it really everywhere? Or is it a red-herring? A New McCarthyism? Puritanical? Cancel Culture? Dogmatic?

This idea of being woke – of wokeism – appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Does it have a history? What’s going on under the surface when you strip away the noise?

Let’s just get stuck in. We’ll look at the history of the term, how it is related to political correctness, ask whether it goes back further, before thinking about what I’ll describe as the broadening of the public sphere, and the cancel culture debate.

The problem with any analysis of a term like woke is that it’s vague, already outdated, contested, and means different things to different people.

What I want to try and show is that it’s best understood not as a concept but as a logic or process.

Its original meaning – staying alert to injustice – has been reinterpreted by reactionaries to ironically describe the misguided, the censorious, and the dogmatic.

But if it’s just a label, how does it become an -ism? A culture? A movement?

To many, wokeism is equivalent to cancel culture, while many who are labelled as woke would reject the term entirely, or at least never use it themselves.

Of course, the idea of being ‘awake’ to something is a vague notion. But in the early twentieth century, this idea of being ‘awake’ became associated with philosophical ideas about self-consciousness and identity, especially for black Americans and the colonised.

The black nationalist Marcus Garvey urged the oppressed colonies to ‘wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!’, and argued that descendants of slaves in the US could only achieve political consciousness through separation, independence, and an exodus back to Africa.

Sociologist and precursor to the civil rights movement, W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote about a black ‘double consciousness’ and a life ‘within the veil’.

He wrote, ‘one ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The History of the American Negro is the history of this strive-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self’.

The first writer to use the term woke in print was probably William Melvin Kelley, who argued that beatniks had appropriated black ‘woke’ slang. He wrote that, ‘the American Negro feels he can, on the spur of the moment, create the most exciting language that exists in any English-speaking country today. I asked someone what they felt about white people trying to use “hip” language. He said: “Man, they blew the gig just by being gray”’.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon wrote extensively about black and colonised consciousness and identity in the middle of the twentieth century.

For most of the twentieth century, though, it was a marginal word. It only gained wider currency in the outrage over the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in 2014. It was quickly adopted by Black Lives Matter protestors as a reminder to be aware of police injustice.

At its simplest, then, the term ‘woke’ has been used to encourage political awareness of injustice, to ‘wake up’ to social issues that are otherwise hidden, especially with regards to racial justice.

But the term was quickly co-opted by the right and turned into a term of derision. The wokearati, the woke mob, and cancel culture were, in the eyes if many, a loud misguided movement determined to silence their ideological enemies.

At that moment, the way ‘woke’ was used slipped neatly into another lineage – political correctness.

In his history of the concept, historian Geoffrey Hughes has defined political correctness as a ‘slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features’.

It’s striking how similar the political correctness and woke debates are.

A 1992 article in the Scotsman remarked, for example, that ‘a survey of children’s authors by the writers’ group PEN suggests that publishers are not content merely with encouraging writers to be politically correct, but are actually censoring anything they feel to be politically incorrect’.

The 1997 Oxford Dictionary described PC as ‘conformity to a body of liberal or radical opinion on social matters, characterized by the advocacy of approved views and the rejection of language and behaviour considered discriminatory or offensive’.

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991) defined it as ‘marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially race, gender, sexual affinity, or ecology’.

In the nineties, feminists were already arguing that words like chairman or businessman should be replaced with chairperson and businessperson.

To its advocates, being political correct was about reappropriating the labels that were often used to designate outsiders: the colonised, minorities, foreigners – to strip terms of their prejudice and reformulate them with more neutral language.

But where did it come from? Many saw it as a monster invented by the right, conjured up to discredit progressives. But while it was exaggerated by the right, the fight over language was very real.

Author, filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote in 1970’s The Black Woman, for example, that, ‘a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too’.

Facts on File in 1975 wrote, ‘on the lesbian issue she said that NOW [the National Organization of Women] was moving in the ‘intellectually and politically correct direction’’.

Between the 70s and the 90s, the debate had moved into the mainstream in the US and the UK.

So what was significant about that moment? Well, two things had happened.

Some saw it as language emerging out of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao wrote, ‘the failure of the Party’s leading bodies to wage a concerted and determined struggle against these incorrect ideas and to educate the members in the Party’s correct line’.

Trotsky also talked of a ‘correct political perspective’ and the Soviet Union quickly followed Mao’s emphasis on cultural issues.

At the same time, the Cultural Revolution and the cultural turn in humanities departments began to emphasise and study questions of culture, language, and everyday life from a political perspective. The civil rights movements and second wave feminism highlighted questions of culture as much as politics.

Cultural politics – the idea that both were intertwined – became central.

But we could go back further. If wokeness and political correctness are about ‘correct language’, justice and injustice, progressive politics and reaction, then aren’t these timeless phenomena?

As Hughes points out, what was politically correct in England before the Civil War under Charles I changed entirely under Cromwell’s commonwealth, and changed again with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. What was politically incorrect under Tsarist Russia quickly changed under the Bolsheviks. What was politically correct in colonial America was transformed through the war of independence.

So if, as an underlying logic, it is nothing new, what is going on?

The public sphere, according to the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, is the loose set of mediums, persons and institutions through which public affairs are discussed and decided. Under a monarchy, and throughout much the Middle Ages, the public sphere was limited to the King or Queen’s court.

With the development of the printing press and increasingly throughout the Enlightenment, this sphere widened to include philosophers, businessmen, and newspapers. This, of course, required money and a certain social position. However, Habermas argued, the Enlightenment public sphere was dynamic; a proliferation of coffee houses, clubs, masons’ lodges, publications, letters, and books all contributed to the discussion of politics and new ideas.

In the year of the revolution in Paris, every political or politically minded man of any worth started a club or journal. In May of 1789, as many as 450 clubs and 200 journals sprang up across the city.

Compared with today, though, the public sphere was still comprised of a tiny minority of privileged metropolitan elites.

And while this continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more people entered the debates through the sale of cheap newspapers, social mobility and entry into universities, the development of the radio, the television, and the internet.

In the late twentieth century especially, there was a rapid and exponential deepening and broadening of the public sphere, not only through these new media technologies but through globalisation and multiculturalism.

But capital and corporations, legacy media and big money still dominated.

Media theorists call old technology like radio and television one-to-many mediums – one person broadcasting out to many. While the internet can be one to many, many to one, and many to many.

We can roughly map the first wave of political correctness onto moments like the Cultural Revolution, women’s and civil rights movements and globalisation leading to multiculturalism. This brought many into the discussion, while many were still marginalised.

The second wave – wokeism – is an internet phenomenon.

Today, information, to a large degree, has been democratised. Anyone can educate themselves on any topic, and footage of injustice from police shootings and concentration camps can be transmitted around the globe in seconds.

But this digital ecosystem has created new pressures, and there’s one that’s particularly human – the demand that we ‘know’, that we’re in the loop, that we’re up to date with the news, with history, with music, with trends and fashion. We are a gossiping species, and we’re judged on how well we play the social game. We must, above all else, be ‘interesting’.

This applies to justice as much as any other topic. Man, after all, is a political animal. There’s the digital demand that we ‘wake up’, become ‘woke’, know what’s right and wrong in the world, have a viewpoint, an argument.

Traditionally, these questions about politics, culture, and justice were monopolised by the King’s court or the Church, and later, hashed out by newspapers, by political parties, by the New York Times, by polling institutes, by experts and specialists.

They were discussed by ‘experts’ and professionals.

In the classic 1989 book Bureaucracy, political scientist James Wilson writes, ‘a professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to peo­ple who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct’.

The group sets the standards, defines what’s correct, and often has vested interests.

But when it comes to politics and justice, that ‘specialised formal education’ and ‘group-define code of proper conduct’ has always been a chimera. Politics and justice effects everyone, each person and every community has a perspective and a contribution to make. This was the basic premise of the democratic reforms of the past two hundred years.

We can now all, in varying degrees, contribute to the public sphere, have a say on Twitter, start a blog, a podcast, or a Youtube channel.

We can see this broadening of the public sphere in a surprising place: fashion magazines. As this recent Vogue cover story of Malala – the young woman shot by the Taliban for going to school – shows, fashion magazines have become increasingly politicised. Women’s magazines have featured the likes of Kamala Harris, AOC, and Jess Phillips here in the UK.

Teen Vogue has attracted right-wing fury for tweeting things like ‘can’t #endpoverty without ending capitalism!’

And Candace Owens had a meltdown over Harry Styles wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, complaining that we should ‘bring back manly men’ and that this was ‘part of a bigger plan to take down the West’.

Douglas Murray has railed against ‘woke GQ’.

What connects all of this is that there’s a systemic relationship between fashion – or taste – and politics.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu knew this. He saw that tastes, fashions, and trends were a type of currency, what he called cultural capital.

Displaying the right tastes, being ‘in the know’, demonstrating that you have knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’, contributes to your reputation, to your standing.

Talking about what was on TV last night, popular music, the latest novel or fashion trends, or, in more elite circles, highbrow art and opera, signifies that you’re a certain type of person.

An elite Victorian gentlemen in an expensive fashionable suit can immediately demonstrate that he’s of ‘value’, should be taken seriously, and is worth another Victorian gentleman’s time.

Capital and knowledge – whether cultural, social, and economic – is power.

And morality and justice function in the same way. The correct sort of views, the right morals, a virtuous mentality, is more likely to get you accepted in certain circles. Of course, what’s correct changes from circle to circle.

Why is it that multinationals, magazines, and brands seem to be more comfortable making moral statements about the environment, about gender roles, about class, about minority rights?

Because the public sphere has broadened. More people are informed. Editors read the room, know what their demographic likes, play to the crowd.

The broadening has brought with it an explosion of viewpoints, of niche websites, off-shoots of ideological viewpoints. The public sphere has become a wild, dynamic, and postmodern place.

I love these images of coffee houses during the Enlightenment. This was a period of novel and exciting and contentious debate about science, politics, and the world. In this image, the debaters are depicted as agreeable gentleman, while in this one the scene is of a bit more chaos, disagreement, and animation. But its also interesting how these aristocratic gentlemen are dressed the same – they clearly have similar interests, similar values, and a similar language to draw on. Those days are over. But they do point to something. That even then the public sphere was a combative place.

I’ve argued that ‘wokeism’ has emerged because of the broadening of the public sphere, a demand to be ‘in the know’, and a wider democratic and popular interest in justice.

But many would say that that this has led to something else: outrage, cancel culture, dogmatism, witch hunts, and puritanical pontificating, even totalitarianism.

Lets look at three quick case studies. Hans-Georg Moeller from Carefree Wandering. Alex O’Connor from CosmicSkeptic. And Winston Marshall from Mumford and Sons.

Moeller has recently argued that wokeism is primarily a ‘civil religion’ – a ‘shared spiritual moral vision and ideology that has a kind of national foundational impact’ that has an activistic and moralistic approach to political life.

Throughout the video, Moeller takes a seemingly critical view of what he thinks ‘wokeism’ is, describing diversity statements as basically ‘an exercise in woke language’, saying ‘wokeism today has western society in its grip’ and repeatedly arguing that its basis is being ‘unapologetically me’.

Moeller’s fallen into the trap of equating wokeism with religion, a shallow and ahistorical analysis that can’t account for the fact that debates about moral dogmatism and political correctness, in different guises, are as old as time.

Take a look, for example, at this definition comparing ideology to religion by philosopher Karl Loewenstein from 1969: ‘it is characteristic of the religious that it does not admit degrees of acceptance. Being absolute by nature it must either be accepted or rejected; there are only believers and heretics. Most modern political ideologies have become religion-affected in the sense that a particular thought and belief pattern embodies values that are considered absolute by its adherents’.

Moeller’s analysis makes many bizarre claims – that wokeism is individualistic, not postmodern, and is a the ‘metanarrative’ of our time – but the underlying case he makes – that wokeism is a new type of dogmatic religion – is a common one.

In a recent Oxford Union debate CosmicSkeptic makes a similar argument that cancel culture is a new distinct disproportionate cultural phenomenon.

Finally, Winston Marshall stepped down from Mumford and Sons after causing a Twitter backlash for tweeting that the right-wing journalist Andy Ngo was brave for reporting on left-wing violence in Portland.

Okay, so what’s going on?

In all of these cases, the emphasis, focus, and direction of empathy is on the so-called ‘cancelled’, usually – but not always – an elite or privileged person. While their ire is directed at the mob, the crowd, at public opinion, and ordinary people.

In other words, they punch down, not up.

As Tom Nicholas has argued in his video on cancel culture, the mob is often viewed and analysed ‘through the eyes of anxious elite’.

Marshall – rich and famous – stepped down from Mumford and Sons voluntarily and found instant employment in a new career writing and talking about his cancellation on UnHerd (who his father finances), and the circuit of right-wing and liberal shows, podcasts, and channels that criticise cancel culture. The irony with most of these cancellings is that I’d never heard of them until they were cancelled. Now they’re everywhere.

The broadening of the public sphere has meant if you’re a public figure, commentator, or writer – as each of these are – who has a platform and an audience, you no longer have that platform to yourself.

As Clay Shirky wrote in the aptly titled Here Comes Everybody, ‘the more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing’.

The result is simple and inevitable. More than ever, wading into the public sphere and making a public argument – especially on a controversial topic that effects peoples lives – takes an extra layer of courage and an even thicker skin. And that’s great. It should encourage stronger arguments; you better have your points in order if you’re going to make a public point to a passionate crowd on a controversial issue. You should expect pushback, you should know you’re going to face fire, invoke emotion.

That’s courage. Courage isn’t whining, moaning, and protesting that things didn’t go your way. Courage isn’t comparing an organisation not wanting to associate with you with being burned at the stake or sent to the gulag.

The risk of rejection, the possibility of causing offence, is the price of admission to be able to broadcast your own opinions onto a stage of millions in a broadened public sphere. It’s a brave thing to do, admittedly, but we seem to be creating a culture where ‘freedom of speech’ is becoming synonymous with ‘freedom from consequence’. The universe of public opinion is an unpredictably passionate storm – you’re going to get wet, be tossed about a bit, you might even be struck by lightening. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook – they are public stages. You’ve willingly built an audience for yourself. And the audience has fruit.

Piers Morgan can no longer stand on a platform high above the crowd but instead has to engage with an audience. It takes an impressive display of insecurity to moan daily, from a platform you willingly use, about ordinary people responding to you.

There’s something particularly nauseating to me about directing your complaints and criticisms downwards towards ordinary people, rather than upwards to those in positions of power.

Now, are there cases when people will be unjustifiably vilified? Of course. Is faux outrage real? Of course. Should we strive to be as tolerant, open-minded and undogmatic as possible? Absolutely.

But this has always been the case. Dynamic political discussion about morality, justice, and limits is what democracy is about.

We live in a period of history where speech has never been freer. You have never been freer to make a point without repercussions. This is the most tolerant period in history. Gulags and concentration camps are rare. Monarchs are powerless. The politburo is defunct. The church has dismantled its stakes. Almost anything can be published. The public sphere is a rich, vibrant, and broad place.

E.M. Forster couldn’t publish his gay novel Maurice until 1971, despite it being written in 1910. Newspapers were censored right up to the Vietnam war. In France, women couldn’t have a bank account in their own name until 1965. Publishing houses, magazines, and newspapers have always had strict guidelines and editorial codes.

We live in the freest period for speech in history. The public sphere is broad and varied. Expect pushback. Have courage. Punch up, not down. Stay awake to injustice. And be kind.

What is wokeism? Nothing. It’s dead.

Sources

Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture

Angela Nagel, Kill All Normies

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy

https://unherd.com/2019/10/woke-gq-reeks-of-fear/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/fashion-magazines-embrace-woke-politics/

P. Bourdieu, Distinctions

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Natalie Coulter and Kristine Moruzi, Woke girls: from The Girl’s Realm to Teen Vogue

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Tom Nicholas, Whose Afraid of the Online Mob?