PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

Right at the beginning of the conversation, Boghossian points out that you can't use abstract reason to understand how things work in the real world: even theoretical physicists have to look for evidence or ways to test their theories against reality. He says there's a category mistake - people looking to answer problems with philosophy when the answers could only come from science.

They talk about how people have confused themselves, and PB says 'there are whole disciplines like that' which are essentially based on people's confusions or category errors. So they are wandering around, lost in this world of abstraction, and then I suppose, again, the only way to really resolve that is through language, through making things mean what they want them to mean. Otherwise they are in some kind of metaphysical wasteland and the only other option is to abandon it altogether.

One of the aims of identity ideology is to redefine words and upend their original meaning. That is how we find ourselves in the absurd situation where the dictionary definition of 'woman' is considered inflammatory. The way in which language is suffused with the moral judgments of the intersectionalists is a really important point. Language has become a trip wire. Its aim is to obfuscate, deconstruct, subvert and denounce.

This is said so well, thank you Bovary. This is why they like people who are good at language games, at making words mean whatever they want them to mean. Ah, this is why writers are so vulnerable! I have been puzzling over that for such a long time. Finally that makes sense to me. I had always been so confused because writers are readers, and readers are usually clear and critical thinkers. Plus writers have an obvious vested interest in defending free speech. So I never got it.

I would add to that list also another of the targets is to silence. Language is used as a way to unmoor people from their moral and intellectual foundations. If you don't know what the things you're saying mean, or your words can suddenly change meaning so that you're somehow saying the opposite of what you mean - well it's not just the outright threats and cancelling people that is silencing them, but the slipperiness of language itself. Which, again, is a fundamental tenet of postmodernism. I think it was Derrida who talked about slippery meanings. Levering words away from their definitions. In a sense it started in linguistics long before, with the study of semiotics and Ferdinand de Saussure's idea that a word and its meaning are only arbitrarily connected. That was around the start of the 20th century.

Also reminds me of one of the stories in Coddling, where they relate how a supportive email from a faculty member eventually leads to her having to resign. The point they're making there is about students looking for the worst possible interpretation because they are led by their unmediated feelings. But I think there is an element of power being exercised here and I think it is quite intoxicating to students and young people to feel this immense power over adults. Now they can, because they can simply change the meanings of words to make adults say anything they want them to say, and punish them accordingly.

I think it's fascinating and worrying to track this back to the universities. It worries me because we now have whole cohorts of university staff who are trained in this kind of thinking, and they are training the undergraduates...

When I was at university, I was aware of postmodernism as a newish theory, and it was mostly treated as a bit of a silly thing. I read a book called 'The Poverty of Postmodernism' by someone O'Neill and it really just took it all down in a very straightforward way. Then in my final year, I had a lecturer who was very into Butler and gender studies and all that. I found some of the philosophy very interesting and fun, but ultimately it felt quite meaningless. That lecturer was pushing me to apply for a postgrad at the uni, and she outlined this whole area of work for me in 'whiteness studies'. My response was very much, I can't apply for a postgrad in this because I don't really understand it. She thought that didn't matter. Anyway, this is a slightly off topic anecdote as I'm just now seeing it in the context of this ideology. She very much wanted to recruit me because she saw I was capable of working with language in this playful way, and for her it was all about that. Whereas for me, I liked the games but I didn't really see anything of substance there that was worth pursuing - I didn't understand 'whiteness studies' as anything other than an interesting playing around with ideas. I think now that 'whiteness studies' is probably part of the basis of books like White Fragility.