Michael Rectenwald - Beyond Woke

Beyond

Woke

Michael Rectenwald

Copyright Michael Rectenwald, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher except by reviewers who may quote brief passages in their reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-943003-38-9

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Introduction

T he following essays were written over the course of almost four yearsfrom September 2016 to February 2020. They represent the development of my thinking on cultural politics in academia and more broadly. Each is a stand-alone piece and as such the book can be read in any order. The collection includes discussions of social justice, postmodern theory, political correctness, socialism-communism, corporate socialism, and my personal relationships with each. The essays are of varying length, ranging from two to twenty-plus pages. Only four are specifically addressed to academic audiences Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism and Social Justice Ideology, After Social Justice- New Paradigms for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Totalitarianism with Communist Characteristics, Corporate Socialism and Woke Capitalism, and Google Marxism: Internet Ideology & the Academics Who Perpetuate Italthough many others are scholarly.

Several of the essays necessarily overlap topically in various ways, some even including verbatim repetition of short passages. While removing as much overlapping material as possible, I found it impossible to excise all repetition without doing damage to linguistic texture of the pieces. In any case, while overlap remains, the topics are addressed from varying angles.

Woke

According to the social justice creed, being woke is the political awakening that stems from the emergence of consciousness and conscientiousness regarding social and political injustice. Wokeness is the indelible inscription of the awareness of social injustice on the conscious mind, eliciting the sting of conscience, which compels the newly woke to change their beliefs and behaviors.

Wokeness is analogous to the Christian encounter of being saved. Like being saved, being woke involves redressing transgressions through repentance and reformation. And, as the Christian is saved not by works but into works, so the newly converted social justice believers are woke not by works but into woke works.

For Christians, Christ crucified brings ones sins to mind, while also serving as a sacrifice for their absolution. Under social justice, the underprivileged do not absolve sins, but they do bring them to mindas do other woke persons. Like the saved Christian, the social justice woke becomes penitent about previously unacknowledged sin, sin for which they must atone. Under social justice, sin is having acted carelessly from a position of privilege, without sufficient recognition or concern for those whose lack of privilege makes ones privilege possible. Under Christianity, sin is having transgressed against God, sometimes directly but often vis--vis others.

Setting aside metaphysical, theological, and other claims of veracity, there are empirical differences between being saved and being woke. While wokeness begins with change on the level of the individual, it is not the individual that ultimately matters according to the social justice creed. The redemption of the peculiar person, the preservation of individual selfhoodthis is not at issue. Wokeness is, after all, a group phenomenonin the sense that one is ultimately woke for the world. Wokeness does not only or most importantly alter the individual; in order to be woke, one must not only awaken, but also demonstrate a collateral commitment to make reparations for social and political injusticeto help to make a better (more just) world.

The same cannot be said of being saved. Contrary to contemporary social justice Christianity, salvation does not play out on the level of the social group. One works out ones salvation individually and not, as it were, federally. Salvation is personal, individual, singularnot collective. Under Christianity, people are not saved due to their social identity. No one is moral or good because of their membership in a social identity category.

The opposite is the case under social justice. Membership in a subordinated, oppressed social identity category confers higher moral standing under the social justice creed. Such persons are deemed to be the ethical superiors of othersjust as membership confers guilt and low moral standing on members of dominant or privileged social identity categories. Under social justice, it is not what is done that matters, but who does it.

The figure of Jesus Christ, no matter what you believe about his historicity, did not address persons qua members of social groups. He addressed them as individuals whose group memberships may have impacted their values and behaviors but were not determining of their moral status. He did not admonish his followers to attend to the social identity category of others, but rather that their social identity categories ultimately should come to be of no real importance. Jesuss call was not to classes or social identity categories as such, but to the individual soul. God is no respecter of persons is not a call to activism for leveling the social order but rather means that worldly status and importanceor social identitymake no difference in the eyes of God. Yes, Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But he followed this by saying that all things are possible with God.

Beyond Woke

Beyond Woke implies a position better than wokeness, a perspective that may or may not be subsequent to wokeness but is certainly superior to it.

For those who have used the phrase to date, it has essentially meant super-woke. For some, like the founders of a Facebook page Beyond Woke, the phrase means a state of super-enlightenment,

living a life devoted to going deeper. Not just being awake and aware of the wool that has been pulled over the eyes of the people, but a continual and ongoing examination of all of life and a commitment to questioning everything. It isnt just about seeing the veil, but discovering what lies beyond it and seeking both a more enlightened self and a more enlightened society. Not just aware but enlightened. Not just woke, but Beyond Woke.

This passage seems to suggest an awakening into spiritualty and an awareness of how the powers that be pull the wool over the eyes of people and dupe them into believing lies about social reality. But further inspection reveals that the founders of this page define woke in much the same way that it has been used by the social justice left and defined in the Oxford English Dictionary : alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.

Others have mobilized the term to similar endsto define an increased level of activism in education, In short, beyond woke means hyper-woke to the woke world.

A. The Denial of Individuality and Freedom Under

Social Justice

While according to at least one scholar, the individual as such developed historically and as a result of Christianity, the figure of the individual is nevertheless non-ideological. That is, regardless of whether, and if so, over what span of time, the individual was developed or discovered, the individual is nevertheless demonstrably a non-abstract concrete particular.

Individuality is a certain basis for identity. Leaving other species aside, every person is singular, one-of-a-kind, unique. Genetic singularity is the biological correlativesome would say the basisof uniqueness. Yet, by virtue of phenotypes and unique sets of experience, uniqueness holds even for identical twins.