The West’s moral operating system is being overthrown by a woke, Manichaean moral framework. By Claire Lehmann in The Australian.
Earlier this week, … Grace Tame – who was awarded Australian of the Year in 2021 for her advocacy for survivors of sexual abuse – described the sexual violence of October 7 as “debunked propaganda”. … Tame’s denialism, while abhorrent, is not aberrant.
A Crossroads25/YouGov poll conducted last year found only 48 per cent of Australians agreed it was “broadly true” that Hamas killed about 1200 Israelis on October 7, with 44 per cent saying they were not sure.
Ignorance alone does not explain why people are motivated to deny atrocities. And many of those who minimise or reject what happened that day are not disengaged at all. On the contrary, they believe they are informed, engaged and are certain of their views.
The Manichaean framework:
The more honest explanation is that a moral framework shared by many in our country forecloses the conclusion that those who are “oppressed” can also be guilty. When the world is divided into a binary of the oppressors and the oppressed, guilt and innocence are assigned without any reference to conduct. And these categories remain unchanged even after an atrocity.
The framework is Manichaean. The Manichaean religion of the third-century in Persia divided all existence into dualistic cosmology. The world consisted of the struggle between forces of light and dark. Today, this cosmic struggle is between the oppressors and the oppressed.
“I stand with the oppressed,” Tame repeatedly insisted to the ABC. Within this framework, the women of the Nova festival are, by virtue of being Israeli, classified as oppressors. And oppressors cannot be victims. So the evidence of their suffering — the photographs, the witness testimony, the coroners’ reports — must be denied.
The traditional Western framework:
Most Australians have grown up with a different set of moral instincts entirely. The most familiar is the deontological tradition, rooted in our Judeo-Christian heritage. In this framework, murder is wrong and rape is wrong — regardless of who commits them and regardless of the political identity of the victim. The act itself is what carries the moral weight. From this perspective, October 7 was an atrocity because of what was done to innocent civilians: the elderly, women, children. There is no other interpretation.
The utilitarian framework:
The other framework most of us recognise intuitively is the utilitarian: what is good is what benefits the greatest number; what is bad is what causes suffering and harm. From this perspective, October 7 was a catastrophe — for Palestinians above all. Hamas invaded a country it had no hope of defeating, triggering a war that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans and leaving their own territory in ruins. On purely practical terms, October 7 was the worst strategic miscalculation Hamas has ever made.
The left’s new moral operating system:
The Manichaean framework, however, escapes both verdicts. It is not interested in acts or consequences. It is interested only in identity. In this moral universe, evil is not defined by what you do but by what you are: your skin colour, your ancestry, your position in an economic order. Guilt and innocence are collective, inherited and fixed. Author Adam Kirsch calls it a “political theory of original sin”.
In the contemporary theory of settler colonialism — the framework that has come to define progressive politics across the Western world since 2023 –- any people deemed to have arrived in a land already inhabited are classified as oppressors, guilty by definition, regardless of individual conduct. As one American academic wrote: Palestinians are “a non-white, non-European people struggling for liberation and freedom against a settler colonial oppressor”.
From this perspective, whatever Palestinians do – even if it consists of terrorism, rape and murder – is freedom fighting. Whatever Israelis do is colonial oppression. The rape victims at the Nova festival are conveniently ignored. …
This is not a fringe way of thinking, but a system of thought that has been running in academia for 50 years now and is now being taught to the young:
That moral system now has escaped the academy entirely, travelling through activist culture, non-government organisations and social media until it presents itself not as ideology but the correct way to pursue social justice. Tame did not need to read either book [two core texts, by Fanon and by Friere] to absorb their conclusions. She needed only to inhabit the world those books helped create. …
The backlash to Tame may give some a false sense of security that her views are not tolerated in wider society. But in many places they are; in much of the academy, the arts and our broader literary culture, her views are not only permissible, they are the status quo. The world view that absolves the oppressed of any responsibility for their actions is growing in popularity. Young people are seduced by its simplicity. Older people embrace it — without ever reading its core texts — to appear as if they are keeping up with the times.
The left’s new moral operating system is just an excuse to be anti-white and anti-male. It’s woke (by PyschoMath):
“Woke” has always meant nothing but “anti-white.” …
From the beginning of its middle-class, college-educated popular adoption in the 2010s, the word “woke” has always referred to a discrete set of values. These values are well-known and unambiguous.
Slavery bad. White man do slavery. White man too rich. White man steal from brown man. Man bad. Man steal from woman. Man hurt woman! White man hurt brown man! Borders not real. Everything for free! Paid for by white man! Too rich anyway! Christianity bad! Islam good! Marriage and family bad! Polyamory good!
All of these values without exception are degrading, specifically to White Western civilization. Blame is placed specifically on the categories of straight, white, rich, Christian, high-status, and male.
Woke is a grab for power without merit or hard work.