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Chris Bertram
Another week another tedious attack on “wokery” in the New York Times. This is by the conservative David Brooks, but I’ve seen it endorsed by “class-struggle” anti-wokists. Anyway, Brooks helpfully lists the characteristics of wokery in bullet-points, enabling some immediate commentary:
“We shouldn’t emphasize what unites all human beings; we should emphasize what divides us.”
I have no idea what this means, concretely, since it seems sensible to “emphasize” both, depending on the purpose and context. Climate change, to give an obvious example, both unites all human beings since it threatens us as a species and divides us since its immediate impact falls on the poorest and most vulnerable people, often living in poor countries, and not wealthy Americans, like Brooks.
“Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.”
The history of all hitherto-existing societies and all that. Not all human relations, obviously, but it seems futile to deny the pervasiveness of this kind of conflict. Often it is class-based, but nobody sensible denies that racial, gender and other oppression mark much of human history. Some crude Marxists, of course, think that these other conflicts as just epiphenomenal and that they would go away in a classless society. Well maybe they would, I’d note only that more sophisticated Marxists have thought we need to consider other identities non-reductively alongside class.
“Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never really understand the experience of someone in another group.”
I dunno. What is it like to be a poor black woman? No doubt she can tell me of her experience and I can empathize, but I don’t think I can fully reproduce her first-person perspective. It just seems obvious that we need to hear from the oppressed themselves rather than just relying on how we represent them in our political theories.
“The goal of rising above bigotry is naïve. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.”
This just seems to be a contingent claim about American society, rather than about every human society. It might be true, and if so, so much the worse for “American society”, which would need to be replaced by something else. The evidence so far doesn’t give much hope to those who think that bigotry and racism are going to disappear from that society. Obviously that’s bad news for American liberal nationalists, but they strike me as naïve (yes that was Brooks’s word) utopians anyway.
“Seemingly neutral tenets of society — like free speech, academic freedom, academic integrity and the meritocracy — are tools the powerful use to preserve their power.”
Again, not always, not only, but surely sometimes, and particularly when those “tenets” are articulated thoughtlessly by the likes of Brooks. Perhaps he could pay some attention to who gets to speak and who doesn’t; which voices are silenced and which not. And “meritocracy”? It seems he is even unaware of the satirical origins of the word.
The basic lesson is that Brooks, like other “anti-wokists” such as Mounck, attack implausibly strong versions of “wokery” in order to avoid having to take seriously the embarassing insights that they wish to deny. The other point to make about them is that, while trumpeting the claims of “universalism” against particular divisive identities, they fail to notice that their own American nationalism is a thoroughly anti-universalist identity and ideology. So it goes.
Not the greatest of photographs, but I thought I’d continue with a bird. When I was looking at this one I was approached by some French retirees who asked me if there was anything interesting to see. Not knowing the French for egret, I said “Il y a un héron”, only to get the slightly contemptuous reply “Ce n’est pas un héron, c’est une aigrette!”. So I learnt a new word.
I’ve not done much bird photography. It is actually pretty hard, since they move fast, change direction, disappear as soon as they see you, and are generally uncooperative subjects. But I’m resolved to do more and I’ve started to figure out some of the technical issues. There’s something serendipitous about this one, as I was actually concentrated on the bird to the left and didn’t realise that I had also captured its companion.
Amid the current horror and propaganda, the pogroms, kidnapping and bombings, and the (at best reckless) violence against civilian populations it is important not to lose sight of what a justish solution might be in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me that this is actually a rather simple matter at least as soon as we set aside outcomes that require the total erasure by displacement or murder of either Jewish Israelis or Palestinian Arabs or the unjust domination of one group by the other. Some “just” solutions are better than others, but in the non-ideal world we have to accept some compromise with geopolitical force majeure and the fact that some people just hate other kinds of people.
Just-ish solutions
1A: A single state in which everyone living long-term within its borders has citizenship on equal terms, irrespective of national, ethnic or religious background.
1B: A single state with some kind of consociational system for power-sharing and, therefore, some explicit recognition of individual national, ethnic, or religious affiliation.
2: A two-state solution involving demarcated territory for each national group, based on some fair territorial settlement between them.
1A is preferable to 1B is preferable to 2, from an abstract liberal and democratic perspective. But given that we live under non-ideal circumstances and peace is also important, then 2 strikes me as acceptable.
Sorry, when you are semi-retired and in France anyway, easy to forget days of the week. Here’s an iPhone photo, from when I happened to be out and about in Pézenas. The wall is actually something to do with a local sport, possibly “jeu de tambourin”, but I’m not quite sure of its function, and the former playing area is now a car park.
Tomorrow morning brings the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende [Le Monde has that photo], a coup which was, of course, followed by mass incarcerations, witch-hunts and murders and by the exile as political refugees of many Chileans of the left. (In today’s climate those exiles would have struggled to find sanctuary. Perhaps Sunak and Braverman would have put them on the Bibby Stockholm, a marginal improvement on a Santiago football statium.) I remember the coup, sort of, as a teenager. But not clearly: it was something shocking and far away. But the years of aftermath I do remember: meeting exiles, Latin American solidarity campaigns with them, the showings of films like The Battle of Chile and, later, Missing.
I have nothing particularly insightful to say now about the coup itself, or the later, shameful failure of the British to hold Pinochet to account for his crimes (“he was only giving orders”). But, in an atmosphere where the political right from Fox News to the British Daily Telegraph to France’s C-News whip up paranoid fantasies that might serve to legitimate “pre-emptive” action even against liberal democracies, and where Donald Trump remains a threat, it is worth re-reading Ralph Miliband’s essay from 1973, and particularly his thoughts about the editor of the London Times:
In so far as Chile was a bourgeois democracy, what happened there is about bourgeois democracy, and about what may also happen in other bourgeois democracies. After all, The Times, on the morrow of the coup, was writing (and the words ought to be carefully memorized by people on the Left): “… whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene”. Should a similar episode occur in Britain, it is a fair bet that, whoever else is inside Wembley Stadium, it won’t be the Editor of The Times: he will be busy writing editorials regretting this and that, but agreeing, however reluctantly, that, taking all circumstances into account, and notwithstanding the agonizing character of the choice, there was no alternative but for reasonable military men … and so on and so forth.