No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why. By James Lindsay.
It is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal.
In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. …
Conversation and debate are part of our game, …not part of their game. …
How can fact-challenged midwits win debates? How can they rule society?
The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world.
In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases.” This is such a profound departure from how the rest of us — broadly, liberals — think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this. …
[They explicitly reject] soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about) and can easily be extended to science, reason, and rationality, and thus also to conversation and debate.
[The] claim is that these tools — essentially all of the liberal ones — cannot dismantle liberal societies from within, which is their goal, because they are the very tools that build and keep building it. …
The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant. …
Our way is better, trust us:
This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.
Their analysis would insist that their methods aren’t weak; it’s that the dominant system treats them unfairly. By being forced to participate in the dominant system, they therefore believe, they’re being cheated of the full force of their cause. …
They feel so strongly. Isn’t that what matters?
Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them.
Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. …
Debate is a no-win for them. …
They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out.
Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way. …
Truth and power:
Foucault held … that whether or not a truth claim is actually true or not is mostly irrelevant because the interesting thing to focus upon is the political process that allows certain people (say, scientists) to be regarded as recognized authenticators of truths. This process is what shapes the prevailing discourses and thus defines, as Foucault had it, a “regime of truth” or “episteme” that dictates what is and isn’t considered true (whether it is true or not) and thus how society will be organized politically, socially, and practically.
In particular, it explains what ideas will be considered accepted and acceptable and which will be considered unacceptable, unthinkable, or crazy. …
Self-interested religion morphs into tribalism:
They believe all disagreement with them to be illegitimate. …
The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate. Read it again: unless you actually agree, you didn’t disagree correctly …
Anyone not in their tribe is immoral and deserves what’s coming to them:
The Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible.
They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. …
You’re either with them or against them:
Such a stain is automatically contagious, in addition to whatever real damage it does to further its advancement into the world. As they tweet, so they are: “ten people at a table with one Nazi is eleven Nazis at a table.” …
To give you some idea of just how extreme they are in their fear of being associated with people “on the wrong side of history,” … Imagine that a Critical Social Justice Theorist were to publish an essay in the New York Times Opinion column this month, and a couple of months from now, I were invited to do so and did. Now we’re both people who have essays published in the New York Times Opinion column. The logic of “non-consensual co-platforming” would be that the editors of that column did a bad by putting me, a known undesirable, in the Opinion pages where there is also a Woke purist, obviously without having first got her consent to have been “co-platformed” with me in the same publication. …
Now, the Woke purist is in the unpleasant situation of having been published in a place that is willing to sully its own reputation later by the publication of some deviant rascal. This is how seriously they take the stain of guilt by association.
The Woke ideology is so sensitive to the moral taint of being associated with moral undesirables that — again, especially in the context of a conference lineup — they believe that stain of co-platforming is contagious even in this extraordinarily distant way. If you think that people who think this way about moral contagion are going to get on stage and have a conversation with you, you’re positively out of your mind. …
Is a modern democracy even possible with these people?
Woke is an alliance of midwits, rolling back the Enlightenment and returning to tribalism. Debate, rationality and modernity — “acting white” — scares them and they reject it.
