Slavoj Zizek article - Wokeness is here to stay

So it isn't really about young people, but why older people, many of them decision makers are so willling to change their ways of working, what they teach etc., to this minority group.

Maybe we should be discussing the older generation. The children of baby boomers who grew up in the loads of money era.

You touched a nerve with me here. I'm late Gen X, born to early baby boomers, and have a slightly different take on this.

I have always felt that the baby boomers had too strong a hold on pretty much everything, from culture to the economy to society to politics, until about ten years ago.

Now this is only my experience, obviously, but the baby boomers really would not yield at all. As a young (and not so young) woman, it was virtually impossible to navigate around them or get anywhere. They held all the positions of power, and personally, I felt there was a real suppression of my generation, culturally and economically, not helped by the extraordinary rises in the costs of housing at the time.

It was so bad when I was in my mid twenties that pretty much everyone I graduated with migrated to another country. If I were being blunt, I might say the baby boomers wanted to hold onto the power and spotlight for as long as they could.

What I now realise, as a much older woman, is that not only wouldn't baby boomers give a little, but also rarely engaged in any kind of mentoring of the next generation (unlike their Silent Generation parents). I don't think they even considered what would happen after they retired. There was no succession planning, no sense of needing to develop a continuity process.

So when they began to retire, it created a void of knowledge and leadership because Generation X had not been mentored to step into their vacant shoes. Indeed, Gen X had been so suppressed, in many cases, they were barely at a middle-management level (or a version of).

What I suspect has happened as a result of this is that the Millennials took advantage of that void and have whooshed in to fill it, despite having nowhere near the experience or wisdom required, helped by ridiculous fashions in recruitment practices that valued "star skills" above experience or expertise.

So we are now in a weird situation where we have seen boomers retire over the last fifteen years and suddenly key leadership and authority posts are full of thirty somethings or younger (the comment above about 19-year-old councillors fits this model). Gen X is almost invisible.

I've seen this situation replicated in a lot of industries and sectors: from governance to higher education to journalism to the civil service. I now see twenty-somethings getting jobs and positions that I would never have been able to get at their age twenty-five-years ago, and thirty-somethings leading departments that 50 and 60-somethings would have led when I was at that age.

This, I wonder, might possibly be the reason for the rapid rush of wokery throughout society. When the baby boomer dam disappeared, there was no Gen X dam behind it.

you can't have a society without some degree of social morality, and social norms, and some means to teach those things and enforce those things within the society.

So totally disagree with this. And not even sure how it relates to this thread!

Women's rights is only one facet. The threats to freedom of speech/thought/belief issue are just as acutely important, in my view.

I would maybe want to examine the idea that politics, or morality, or religion, are mainly about control and domination.

I think that is true to an extent, but it's also true, in my view, that you can't have a society without some degree of social morality, and social norms, and some means to teach those things and enforce those things within the society.

The problem is perhaps the word 'domination', where one could look at it more in the sense that societies require order, and that often involves hierarchies?

An oversimplification and emphasis on how everyone is 'equal' is maybe something else that feeds into this ideology, and tends to lead us towards the flattening of structures - the end of experts, the suggestion that a child's uninformed view is of equal value to that of an experienced adults, the devaluing of the idea that we can assess some 'facts' as more truthful/useful/accurate than others, etc.

People took valid ideas about equity of sex, race, etc, that were correcting injustice, and tried to apply them to every situation which involves a hierarchy.

Not that hierarchies and power shouldn't be interrogated and tested and proved, as they perhaps weren't in the past (god-given rights no longer seen as valid reason for taking power) but people have instead gone for 'there shouldn't be any hierarchies or power structures at all'.

I did find the idea of plurality of views mentioned upthread intending to lead to a sort of Platonic ideal really interesting; I'd wondered if the 'fuck everything, nothing is real' stance was a gross oversimplification!

Ah yes, we can add intergenerational factors to the list, including changes in parenting, plus we can also add the way that university students are now paying customers to be pandered to.

So trans activism has several important contexts:

Post-modern ideas of 'personal truth'
The social-media echo chamber
Loss of identity rooted in traditional social communities
The boredom of ordinary life compared to digital hyper-reality
A middle class using identity politics to avoid talking about economic class
The take-up of social progress as a substitute for economic progress
The lack of religious faith/belief and the need to believe in something else

plus more that I have probably forgot to list

and according to Zizek something about superego and dreams.

It may not be possible to fight back effectively and defend women's rights without addressing each and all of these. 😕

Not ignoring what the rest of you have said, but taking up from where I left off yesterday about how rapidly the world has changed and what used to locate people has shifted or even vanished, so that the unreality of the internet impacts on how people think. So as said up thread for a lot of young people politics is performative (althought the SWP etc were doing this in the 70s to get pictures in the media who preferred an image to any words).

And the other big change is "education" which has been turned into a commodity. Despite all the allegations about boomers having it easy, only a very tiny % went onto hight university and either had some sort of apprentiship or for legal, financial and other white collar work became articled clerks (5 years of misery).

Now throught the Labour notion of higher education for all it isn't just that what can be achieved doesn't have any value, but that because it is bought and paid for the balance between those who are teaching and those who are learning has shifted.

I am not saying the old elite system was the best, but that education itself is no longer and learning and progressing towards something. If facts have to be edited so that students dont feel "uncomfortable" ie challenged, this only re-inforces the notion that their feelings take precedent over reality.

There are so many examples in history where young people get swept up in not just left politics but right (think of Germany in the 1930s) but the concern was that their naivety was easy to exploit.

Now we have almost the reverse where young people's naivety is extolled and amplified by parents. Do politicians really think that if the pander to younger people that at some point they can say to them we just wanted you to join us but what we actually want to do is ....

Or is it just an extension of affirmative parenting, or worse, as in the early dats of XR parents were effectively exploiting their children by pushing them forward to the front line for interviews and coaching them to mate cute comments and supplying them with meme ready placards. Greta Thunberg is the ultimate example of this, through her parents manipulation of the media when she first started her solo protests. And then later encouraging her to think that her simplistic notion of just stating this is right, and pimping her out to the MSM, created a further public perception that again performative was as effective as actually doing something. This is a bit of a side track, but there seems to be a trend in the media to ask people who will admit to autism or some other condition, and acknowledge that their pursuit of a topic can be influenced by this, as they think it makes good tv. Rather than does it actually offer a realistic way forward.

So young people are more adrift, and maybe more in need of finding a group identity.

But none of this explains why those with influence eg the media, advertisers etc., are so willing to then enter into what is effectively a niche world, and portray it as though reflective of the majority.

So it isn't really about young people, but why older people, many of them decision makers are so willling to change their ways of working, what they teach etc., to this minority group.

Maybe we should be discussing the older generation. The children of baby boomers who grew up in the loads of money era.

Definitely worth considering how the impact of the internet has impacted on the human psyche. Yes, 'spectacle' and immediacy, and also a sudden intense globalism that we've never had access to before.

Surely the destabilising effect of postmodern ideas about decentring truth, coupled with the ability to communicate, suddenly, with virtually anyone anywhere, could feasibly lead to a huge crisis in how we have to measure and assess ourselves, our worth, our morals, against infinite access to what feels like limitless information on every other time period, culture, and social setting.

Which could easily feed into moral relativism and the loss of any form of cohesive narrative for societies or individuals within them. And a disconnected 'post human' idea of what is possible and desirable.

It struck me the other day that it's possibly an evolution of what Debord saw in the early 60s: the spectacle. This is where society, in short, has replaced real human interactions and experiences with consumerist images. It's also an aspect of what Baudrillard called hyperreality.

And what it comes up against, again and again, is the fairly disappointingly mundane aspects of plodding meatlife. Sex is immutable, boringly. We're all fallible, imperfectible, mortal beings. Just a bunch of mammals with over-excited pre-frontal cortices, really. And a persistent itch to apply narratives to our lives in the face of what may well be random accidental evolution.

It wasn't that every perspective was True per se, although every perspective was 'valid' and 'necessary' for the enterprise. Nor was it the case that individual perspectives had to be treated with respect and recognised and responded to with commitment: they were just material to feed into the Truth engine.

This is really interesting. It implies that the 'truth' of a transactivist is necessary to get the full picture, to make sure everything has been considered and no-one's view is overlooked.
Because without multiple perspectives we risk being caught in a kind of fundamentalism, or risk reaching incomplete conclusions. We need all the perspectives in this Venn diagram (and many more perspectives not shown here). Then we can pick apart what is useful and valuable in all of these 'truths'.

deadwildroses.com/2019/10/07/handy-venn-diagrams-the-radical-feminist-position-on-gender/

Why has it been forgotten that progress actually occurs in laboratories and on engineering floors?

Because that progress has stalled. For various reasons, including energy costs.

And any technological progress that does happen is not really impacting lives.
Okay we have smartphones. But back in the 70s one person (usually a man), could support a partner at home and a family, pay the rent or mortgage, run a car, and have a modest family holiday, all on one wage.
Now it takes two wages to meet the rent, no hope of a mortgage, and you can't have a baby without needing state benefits.
That is the reverse of economic progress for the masses.

So believers in progress have latched onto social progress instead.

@ColdMeg

Very interesting - thanks

I am sorry about this post. I've written loads.

I think that this may make sense to some, but what is clear is that "wokeness" is about performative politics.

It struck me the other day that it's possibly an evolution of what Debord saw in the early 60s: the spectacle. This is where society, in short, has replaced real human interactions and experiences with consumerist images. It's also an aspect of what Baudrillard called hyperreality.

I noticed with the Bristol statue incident that the whole behaviour was focused on one precise moment: when the statue fell into the water. It was, almost, and this is a weird thing to say but hear me out, mimicking the orgasmic process. That moment was like a surrogate ejaculation for the release of whipped-up tension. It was "the money shot".

But here's the thing ... the "money shot" and its creation is what now constitutes "activism." Where once activism was about stuffing thousands of envelopes and distributing pamphlets and holding meetings in weird places, building a solid core of thoughts and opinions, yet also adapting along the route, it has become, instead, the creation of a five second moment.

This is not the way to change anything. The world is beyond complex, and to assume one can in any way control such entropy is deluded. There are very few things someone can change in their immediate environment without significant compromise (with the exception of possibly erecting a dog poo bag bin), never mind on a wider level.

Change takes persistent work, usually through a process of gradual incrementalism. It is a life's work for most people who manage to change one small single thing. Even Barack Obama said that as US president, you can probably only shift things about 10%.

So how have we got here? Is it constantly telling young people that they can change the world by "using their voices", when, in reality, it is often a lifetime's work?

Most people have attached to 'Progress' as a religious substitute or secular religion

The interesting thing about progress is that it is largely a technologically-driven phenomenon. Things are different from the past because we now have antibiotics, for example, or electricity, not because our souls and minds have intrinsically evolved.

People and society don't really change at all. You realise that when you look at social history. Today's mugger is the descendent of the 18th century's footpad. County lines is the modern version of the Victorian "kidsman's" trade. Wokery is the new puritanism. We are awash with modern Mr/Mrs/Mx Jellabys, who fixate more about amazon rainforests than they do about Britain's serious levels of deforestation. Even the modern clamour over "soft sentences" is strange when you look at the actual outcomes of certain regional 19th century trials.

Why has it been forgotten that progress actually occurs in laboratories and on engineering floors?

Acceptance of sexual liberation was a product of the pill, the antibiotic and better screening tests (because, otherwise, British society would have ended up riddled with STIs and abandoned babies, a bit like the situation in the late 19th century when there were very real fears that syphilis would wipe out the population).

Women's liberation was the product of electricity because without washing machines and irons and ovens and clean ways to heat homes, most married women would have had to stay home to do the time-consuming labour of washing things in dolly tubs, cooking food on coal ranges, and trying to stop the coal dust from coating everything with soot.

Yeah, the trouble with postmodernism is that if nothing is 'true' and everything is relative, what are we supposed to believe in? We have to believe in something.

What is really weird about the way postmodernism is talked about today is that, even back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, the point of the postmodern perspective was that Truth (with a capital T) could only be perceived through plurality.
So the idea was that to see the Truth of a thing, you had to explore how everyone saw the thing, and in doing that, a shape of the Truth would emerge in the cacophony, somewhat like a Platonic form.

It wasn't that every perspective was True per se, although every perspective was 'valid' and 'necessary' for the enterprise. Nor was it the case that individual perspectives had to be treated with respect and recognised and responded to with commitment: they were just material to feed into the Truth engine.

It seems like this understanding has gone missing when public intellectuals talk about postmodernism these days.

unherd.com/2023/03/the-death-of-historical-truth/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=c859c754cd&mc_eid=8424260694

Quite an interesting article in Unherd, today, which addresses some of the above discussion on truth and relativity: unherd.com/2023/03/the-death-of-historical-truth/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=c859c754cd&mc_eid=8424260694

"The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

Those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs are almost bound to end up by suppressing competing views. If what we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by power structures invisibly controlling our schools, universities, publishers and museums, then there is no point in debate. You have to change the power structures, take control of those institutions and create a new consensus. This is what is now happening. It is happening with the enthusiastic support of many of the institutions themselves. They lack the self-confidence to stand up for a rational approach to empirical research and knowledge which alone justifies their existence. I am not going to suggest that modern academic scholars on the British Empire and slavery are all determinists in the mould of Foucault and Edward Said. However, their treatment of the past often shares the three main vices of postmodernist history: tendentious selection, exaggeration and intolerance of dissent"

I think faith might be to do with belief and finding meaning.

But religion, as an institutionalisation of that, has quite the history of social
control.

Yeah, the trouble with postmodernism is that if nothing is 'true' and everything is relative, what are we supposed to believe in? We have to believe in something.

So belief sneaks in by the back door, thoughts are anchorless and driven entirely be emotion, and people end up believing that it is possible to change sex.

@hryllilegur

I find it interesting that you see religion in terms of a social morality system and a tool of power or control.

I was thinking of religion in terms of what people can "believe in", what gives their life meaning. Which is why the narrative of Progress is so pervasive - people 'believe' in it like a religion, and without it life is meaningless.

If you don't believe in God (gods/goddesses), you most likely believe in "Man" (capital M, i.e. humanity as a whole). The conclusion is that mankind is eventually destined for a bright shiny Star Trek future out among the galaxies. To believers, this is inevitable, right, and self-evidently a good thing.

Back to your point, the analysis of morality and abuse of power in the woke movement is absolutely key to understanding it - both as part of the religion of progress and as a phenomenon in itself.
Zizek comes up with a 'Superego' explanation, linked somehow to dreams. I'm not sure that is entirely useful, but every bit of the jigsaw helps.

Thank you all for this thread - I'm not smart enough to contribute but its so interesting reading your thoughts. You're putting into words many ideas I've been unable to elucidate.. 😊

Ironically, most of the theories that start with post-, actually argue against the idea that there’s any possibility of a true self. Or a true anything.

But that bit gets swept under the rug.

It actually amazes me that poststructural and postmodern theory is used to make claims about (essential) identity and authentic selves. That’s even more
bonkers than some of the stuff to be found in a thousand plateaus.

To a degree.

If you look at contemporary political debate, the quasi religious nature of it all isn’t limited to the woke aspects. Politicians of all ilks draw on the idea that ‘it is right to’ to root their decisions in a supposedly shared morality.

I guess that with the waning of Christianity (and its institutions) as the determiner of that shared morality has meant that other morality systems (in a loose sense) fill the void.

Interestingly, the urge is still to institutionalise the power structures based on this (ambiguous) morality.

I always think that religion is just an ancient and well established form of social policy. The aim is to control what people do and legitimise your claim to do so in moral terms. Without a god to centre your machinations around, you have to operate somewhat differently and find different ways of delegitimising competing moral value systems/claims on power.

So we see attempts to elevate terms like ‘progressive’ to quasi-devine status. And ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’ to a kind of apostasy.

It’s all just about gaining the power to control others though. Lots of people want to be followers, but also to believe that acting as the enforcers of an ideology makes them ‘leaders’.

I think the opposite - 'wokeness' is a very poor substitute for genuine political engagement. In fact wokeness works to prevent political engagement of the traditional sort (concern with money, unions etc.), because it is a distraction, it fills the attention so that people can't focus on what the real issues are.

Wokeness also prevents young people learning how to debate, how to think about issues and work with other people to negotiate agreement. Wokeness is anti-debate, anti-thinking, anti-facts. It is all about subjective feelings replacing objective truth.