Left Is Not Woke

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It begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to [a] focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma. A rather fascinating finding is that ‘One in five One Nation voters (22%) would describe themselves as woke.’ One Nation is a right wing party known for advocating low immigration and opposing Aboriginal self determination. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Thought, York University and author of Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself. But the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times. From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about: Neiman’s short, punchy, and brilliantly articulated argument is essentially a call for those who regard themselves as being on the left to remember the distinction between skepticism and cynicism.”

MB: Foucault’s defenders would argue that, unlike real reactionaries, he was fighting against oppression by exposing its mechanisms. Neiman’s primers on the anti-colonialism of Immanuel Kant and neoliberalism of Foucault are accessible and engaging enough. But it seems doubtful that imploring young progressives to read more Kant and Voltaire is an effective means of countering woke ideology. It seems plausible that one can draw a line of devolution from Foucault and Schmitt’s theories of power down to the bizarre dogmas found in a Telluride anti-racist workshop or Okun pamphlet. But it does not follow that rebutting the former will lessen the latter’s cultural influence. SN: Well, it does! In any case, even the woke often presume it. You can’t grow up in this culture without absorbing it. I once got talking about evolutionary psychology with my son, who’s a documentary filmmaker and very woke but a sophisticated thinker. And he told me: “Well, that’s just science!”MB: You make some harsh judgments about Michel Foucault, calling him at least as reactionary as Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre, two key figures of the Counter-Enlightenment. How come then he’s regarded as a paragon of progressive thought?

Susan Neiman:Because the Enlightenment wrote the metaphysics of universal human rights. And in fact, I wouldn't have seen it this way at the time, but it completely hooked up with the moral and political influences of my childhood. Alex Chambers:That's what's coming up. We talked about how her childhood and adolescence in the American south shaped her politics and philosophy, how she got into philosophy as a way to think about big questions that matter to people, not just obscure abstract concepts. And why she's such a passionate defender of the enlightenment. Here we go. What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Susan Neiman ( / ˈ n aɪ m ən/; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

References

Samuel Huneke lauds the fashionable view of many postcolonial thinkers that “reason is an imposition of European power on a global scale.” Perhaps that’s why his review of my Left Is Not Woke exhibits less reason than rage, blinding him to the fact that most of his objections are answered in the book itself. In her aspiration to smear Foucault, Neiman goes so far as to tie him and “the woke left” to Nazism. Comparing him with Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who, according to Neiman, shared with Foucault “a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress,” she suggests that by rejecting the Enlightenment, the contemporary Left has embraced the intellectual tenets of fascism. The “woke insistence on a tribal understanding of culture,” Neiman tells us, “is not far enough from a Nazi insistence that German music should only be played by Aryans.” If you equate those fighting for queer rights and those fighting against police brutality with the Nazis, you have lost the plot. It’s a cheap shot and shoddy argument, unworthy of a scholar of Neiman’s standing. The first problem is that she doesn’t deal much with what “wokeness” really is, nor give examples of it to buttress her thesis.’ 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.

Neiman sets her sights on Foucault as an exemplar of this turn away from Enlightenment reason, arguing that he pioneered a worldview held today by “the woke left.” The French philosopher, who still looms large over academic discourse, did indeed question the principles of the Enlightenment. In dozens of books, lectures, and essays, he contended that while Enlightenment ideas may have made the world more humane, they also substituted naked and obvious domination for far more insidious forms of power that work through norms and institutions to shape our very existence. My sense is that calling attention to the peculiar dynamics of contemporary progressive institutions — and noting that these yield incentives that are often diametrically opposed to the imperatives of effective political action in an ethnically and ideologically heterogenous democracy — may be a more effective means of combating wokeness, in Neiman’s pejorative sense, then excavating the anti-colonial side of Kant. SN: There’s something to that. I’ve met people who are so put off by woke ideas that they say they’re moving towards the center or the center-Right. But what’s more common is that people who would be on the Left are getting out of political engagement, because they feel that the Left has been captured. I end the book by reminding people how the fascists came to power in 1933: if leftists had formed a united front against fascism, the world would’ve been spared a terrible war. The problem is that the Left always eats its own children and misses the real danger. Donald Trump really could become president again. Le Pen could beat Macron if elections were held today. The president of the biggest country in the world is a fascist according to my Indian friends. The dangers of our time are very real, and we need to strengthen our own ranks. SN: The problem is that you can make the same relativist claim about “indigenous” customs and traditions that are even worse, like Female Genital Mutilation. Someone like Narendra Modi is a perfect example of the misuse of such post-colonial rhetoric and claims about indigeneity. Yes, human rights were originally formalized as a concept in Europe, though versions of them exist in other cultures. But for all of the very real harms of British colonialism in South Asia, do we really want to say it was wrong for them to protest and to forbid suttee (the burning of widows)? But Neiman’s not a biologist, and her view of evolutionary psychology is shallow and misguided. Evolutionary psychology does not predict that people will act in their own self-interest in every case: the “selfish” gene is “selfish” simply because natural selection can be seen metaphorically as genes trying to be “selfish” by outreproducing other genes. Dawkins, frustrated by this misunderstanding (much of it coming from Mary Midgley, whom Neiman cites often), says that if he wrote The Selfish Gene now, he may have called it The Cooperative Gene. There is far too much ignorant dissing of evolutionary psychology in this book, and it’s a serious flaw. Social rogress has clearly been made despite the fact that we’re products of natural selection, and no evolutionary psychologist I know holds the naive view that Neiman presents as characteristic of the field. We all know, for example, that culture can override evolution, and we also understand ways that natural selection itself can favor cooperation.

Further Reading

It is therefore unclear precisely which forms of putatively progressive rhetoric are (and are not) woke, in Neiman’s estimation. One can imagine what she might be referring to. For example, the socialist political scientist Adolph Reed has objected to the popular claim that mass incarceration represents the “new Jim Crow,” in part because such rhetorical flourishes elide genuine progress toward racial equality. Similarly, the historian Daryl Michael Scott has criticized the ideology of “thirteentherism,” the notion that slavery in the United States was never actually abolished but merely “evolved,” since the constitutional amendment ending chattel slavery allowed for “involuntary servitude” as punishment for a crime. Scott argues (persuasively, in my view) that “thirteenthers” are motivated less by historical accuracy than an ideological desire to deflate claims of racial progress. Let no one confuse what this book has to say with the tired right-wing denunciation of ‘identity politics.’ The right-wing critique charges promoters of difference and multiculturalism with undermining the shared legacy of the national culture. It is a battle pitting one avowed particularism against another alleged particularism. Left Is Not Woke accuses some trendy voices of the left of a fatal self-betrayal: renouncing the very grounds on which the left has traditionally stood, the concepts and principles in the name of which it has fought its battles and advanced its ends, above all, universalism.” At its best, Enlightenment thought teaches us to be skeptical of received wisdom, to question sources of power and structures of domination. This is precisely what the Foucauldian inheritance teaches too. It is, in large part, the project of the contemporary Left. The challenges we face are daunting, made all the more so by entrenched norms and powerful interests with a stake in maintaining the status quo. But, as Foucault writes, “[w]here there is power, there is resistance.” And there’s nothing more hopeful than that. Susan Neiman is an American writer and philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin. She was professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University before coming to the Einstein Forum in 2000. Her works include Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin , The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant , Evil in Modern Thought , Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists and Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age . Susan Neiman is one of our most careful and principled thinkers on the genuine left. In this nuanced and impassioned plea for universalism she has done a public service for readers of every political stripe. If an alliance of conservatives, liberals, and progressives is to succeed in fending off an increasingly undemocratic far right, lucid thinking is our only hope. Left Is Not Woke is an urgent and powerful intervention into one of the most pressing struggles of our time.”