"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism'"

"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism,’ when the two could not be more different. A multiracial society is one in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law. A multicultural society is one in which people are encouraged to ghettoise themselves according to national or cultural identity."

~ Andrew Doyle from his book The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution [hat tip Gary Judd]

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā has become a feature of modern Aotearoa."

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā – that tribe of pale Kiwi with their pounamu lanyards and pained expressions – has become a feature of modern Aotearoa.
    "It is a harmless pantomime, as they cloak themselves in the culturally appropriated korowai of perpetual grievance and benefit from the Kiwi reluctance to cause unnecessary offence....
    "If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a Labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
    "This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'What being ‘woke’ may really mean'

What's 'Woke'?

 What's 'woke'? and why is it called that? Philosopher Stephen Hicks has the simple explanation:

It comes out of the Left politically. Interestingly on the Right politically too (if we can use these labels, left and right, [since they're] both problematic.)

    But on the Right there’s the concept of the 'red pill,' which comes from the movie 'The Matrix.' So the idea then is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically-induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different. 

    So the Left version of this comes out of the 'False Consciousness' tradition. It says that ... we are all raised [or] conditioned into a false narrative that says that [western civilisation is great] or that America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice and freedom for all and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been 'conditioned' into all of us. And what we need to do is to raise our consciousness—and in some cases get slapped upside the head—so that we wake up and look around and realise that we really are oppressed. 

    And that’s a kind of 'awakening,' to see the world as it as it really is. So woke is just a slang-y way of saying that 'I’ve woken up,' and now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is false, and that one has become sensitised, and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.

"The Woke Right ... " [updated]

"The Woke Right is that part of the Right that has decided everything the Left has been saying is bad must actually be good.

"The Left said racism is bad, so racism must be good. 

"The Left said patriarchy is bad, so patriarchy must be good.
"The Left said Fascism is bad, so...

"Because the Woke (or Dissident, or New, or 'New Christian') Right defines itself by glorifying everything the Left said was bad, it becomes an extension of the Left's tortured and destructive caricature of society. They become an extension of the Left and take up its methods.

"The Left wasn't wrong that racism is bad. The Left was wrong about what racism is. The thing the Left referred to as 'racism' isn't racism. Most of it isn't even real. The purpose of most of those claims was to extract power, and it worked because racism is actually bad.

"The Woke or New or Dissident Right ... has adopted a basic reactionary reversal of the Left's pronouncements while accepting the Left's characterisations, framing, and belief in power dynamics."

~ James Lindsay on 'The Woke Right'

UPDATE:

“The Paradox of Heterodox Orthodoxy”

"The big new development this year is the rise of 'Cultural Christianity' or the 'Culture War Christian'—the intellectual who doesn’t necessarily believe in God, but who thinks that Christianity is still somehow necessary for the cultural defense of Western Civilization....

    "Early this year, I linked to a good article in 'Persuasion' by Matt Johnson describing how these Culture War Christians are bringing religious dogma back to the 'heterodox community.' Then Cathy Young leapfrogged us all with the magnificent phrase, “the paradox of heterodox orthodoxy.” Basically, this is what happens when 'anti-woke' intellectuals rebel against the dogmas of the far left—but don’t have the independence of mind to come up with an alternative worldview based on their own observation.

"I added to Johnson’s critique of this phenomenon.

"'Johnson focuses too much on grounding Western liberalism in 'Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism.' That’s true (depending on the meaning of 'skepticism'), but there’s a deeper and more convincing answer.
    "'Conservatives try to ground Western Civilisation on the 'Judeo-Christian tradition'—you know, the one that crashed Western Civilisation the first time it became widely accepted. But they write out of history the true source of unique Western culture: the Greco-Roman tradition. The distinctive culture of the West was created—and even the idea of “'he West' as culturally distinct from 'the East,' originated by Herodotus in response to Persian invasions—by Greek scientists and philosophers centuries before the birth of Christ, and at about the same time the books of the Old Testament were first being written down.

"I can’t emphasise this enough. 'Western Civilisation' cannot be based on Christianity, because it predates the birth of Christ by at least five centuries. I have an article coming out soon that is very specifically about the pre-Judeao-Christian origins of our civilisation, though it probably won’t be published until January.
    "But I’ve spent much of this year attempting to convince people of the viable cultural and intellectual alternatives to Christianity—alternatives that are not merely theoretical, but already here."

~ Robert Tracinski from his post 'Is There Something in the Nothing?'

"Though it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself."

"[T]hough it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself. ... The Mood of the Boardroom Survey & recent remarks by some of this nation's CEOs reflect on the (dubious) quality of New Zealand's boardrooms more than anything else. Namely that most are woke & weak. ...
    "NZ's Big Corporate CEOs will not themselves push productivity-enhancing reforms in their own firms ... They'd prefer, instead, to be Mr Nice Person. Look at the qualifications of many of them - the typical one being in Accounting. Other than that, its law. Lawyers often get on Boards because Kiwi firms want someone to help with compliance - not a person with imagination about where the future of the company should be. ...
    "Before the Productivity Commission was de-commissioned, it identified lack of 'managerial capability' as a contributor to our low productivity. ... Many of our CEOs & Boardrooms are not capable. ... The staff can't make up for a boss who is the wrong boss. ... "

~ Robert McCulloch from his post '"The Mood" of NZ's (Weak and Inbred) Boardrooms reflects on their own ineffectiveness, which has cut productivity, not on our MPs' quality'

"If you have a set of views that you can’t question, and a group of friends who’ll disown you if you do, you’re not a political activist – you’re in a cult."

Pic from The Spectator

"I have in the past admired twentysomethings for their interest in politics at an age when I was mostly clueless. I still do. But if you have a set of views that you can’t question, and a group of friends who’ll disown you if you do, you’re not a political activist – you’re in a cult."

~ Mary Wakefield, from her post 'No one will change their mind about Hamas'

"It is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the 'safety' of a herd.
    "When they speak of merging their selves into a 'greater whole,' it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance."

~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'Apollo and Dionysus' [hat tip Hilton H.]

2020" When "racial politics " took "a deranged and very strange step backwards."

"What came to be known as ‘wokery’ had long been in gestation. .... The first year of lockdown was ... when ... [p]erceptions of race shifted profoundly. The idea that individuals and institutions were ‘unconsciously’ or ‘systemically’ racist had already been established; but this belief, intimating that there was something inherently problematic with white America itself, was now pushed to its extreme. To be white now became problematic in itself. Whiteness became a mark of original sin.
    "Anything associated with the white man and mainstream America was now deemed racist. A pamphlet titled ‘White Supremacy Culture’, published in the late 1990s by academic Tema Okun, proved highly influential. In it, Okun denounced as racist the following ‘white’ values: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word, individualism and objectivity. ‘In this worldview’, writes Bowles, ‘if black people do somehow exhibit urgency or perfectionism, it means there has been internalised whiteness. And that is a type of death for that black person.’ The new racism had simultaneously demonised whiteness and pathologised blackness.
    "Racial politics had taken a deranged and very strange step backwards. ...
    "The grotesque excesses of identitarian politics in America may seem like something from another planet."

~ Patrick West, from his review 'The year America went mad' of Nellie Bowles's new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.