Wokeness has been a culturally powerful and politically contentious issue in English-speaking countries for over a decade. Though the precise moment of what pundits call ‘The Great Awokening’ is a matter of debate, most people date its origin to the period between 2010 and 2014, when scholars noticed a dramatic rise, both in news media and academic discourse, in the use of language associated with race, sex, gender, and homosexuality—usually in the context of identifying and stigmatizing prejudice. Wokeness has been described by writer Wesley Yang as the “successor ideology” to liberalism among cultural and institutional elites. In my 2020 book Live Not By Lies, I likened it to a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.
Le wokisme is finally reaching France. Once the land of stout republicanism and the stereotypical Latin lover, France is now beginning to succumb to a malign cultural force that has radically increased hostility and suspicion among various populations in the U.S. and Great Britain and poisoned public discourse.
In 2021, Pierre Valentin wrote the first study of the rise of woke ideology in France. The conservative author, now 25, has just published the book Comprendre la Révolution Woke (Understanding the Woke Revolution) for Gallimard. I spoke to him at his home in Paris.
How does wokeness manifest in France? How would you contrast it to the same phenomenon in the Anglophone world?
We have the same kinds of ideas and themes, and we are only lagging behind a few years, which is somewhat depressing because it seems to imply a partial determinism of sorts. We have yet to see how far it will go. We used to have a French Left that was perhaps the strongest anti-woke left-wing force in the West. But I think that’s crumbling.
In what sense was the French Left anti-woke?
I think one way of differentiating the French Left from the Anglophone Left is to think of Jean-Jacques Rousseau versus John Stuart Mill. Rousseau has this real fascination with unity, for the idea that you have to come together to make one. It can go too far, as you see in some of his particularly totalitarian writings, but at least there is the sense that you have to try to find unity. Whereas with Mill, it’s ‘live and let live’ individualism.
The transgender movement is really borne from the ‘live and let live’ liberal approach pushed to the maximum, to the point of radical fragmentation. That is antithetical to the approach of the French Left.
Here’s another big difference: being borne from the French Revolution, the French Left understands the world through an anticlerical framework. It therefore regards the woke as ‘the new priests of thought.’ You see this in Québec too. This history of anticlericalism may be why post-Catholic countries have had more resistance to wokeness than the post-Protestant countries, but of course that’s changing too.
Might it also be the natural French hostility to American cultural domination that’s saved you, or made wokeness slower to take root in France?
Mathieu Bock-Côté makes a really interesting comparison in his work La révolution racialiste. He says that France is kind of like the Vendée within the Republic.
The Vendée was a region that was highly Catholic and fiercely resisted the French Revolution.
Yes. So, in this allegory, the West is the French Republic trying to impose its ideology all around its territory and trying to subjugate all the smaller populations that resist. And France itself is like the Vendée, putting up resistance.
That said, I do think the French Left is slowly buckling. First, it’s the demographics. The divide on the Left is almost always old versus young, which suggests that the writing is on the wall. If you are on the wrong side of history, age-wise, you are pretty much screwed.
One way to measure this shift is in the use of what we call ‘inclusive writing.’ In French, nouns are either masculine or feminine. When you make a noun plural, traditionally you use the masculine, but everyone understands that you’re referring to all people, not just men. Feminists say this is making women invisible. Hence, we should have to use inclusive writing.
For example, if you say étudiants (students), you have to write it as étudiant.e.s. The e is for the feminine that has been hidden. I don’t know if this form of writing has progressed overall within the population, but within the parties of the French Left, it certainly has. In the 2012 presidential election, no candidate used it. In 2017, one or two left-wing candidates used it. But by 2022, a majority of left-wing candidates used it in one form or another. By 2027, you would have to be seriously brave to be a left-wing candidate that writes in normal French. So that kind of woke virtue signaling is a decent way of quantifying the evolution within the Left towards wokeness.
This is like the use of the term ‘Latinx’ to replace ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina.”’ The only people in the U.S. who speak that way are academics and media people. Normal Spanish speakers ignore it. Do you think inclusive writing in France will be like that?
Inclusive writing looks a lot like ‘Latinx,’ except it pisses off fewer Mexicans. As usual with wokeness, when it’s faced with the pressure of the market or the electorate, it tends to recede. But if there’s one way it can trickle down to the popular level, it’s through administration. The Paris city government has been using inclusive writing. I booked a flight to London recently, and it was there on the website I used. Sometimes I see adverts in the subway that use it; this wasn’t the case until recently, circa 2022. Let’s wait and see, for sometimes firms try it for a while then stop, so the (inclusive) writing is not necessarily on the wall for France, especially considering how impractical it is for the ordinary citizen.
In the Anglophone world, the French have a reputation for being much more laissez-faire about sexual matters. How has wokeness clashed with the stereotype of the French lover?
I think that’s one area of resistance. There’s a specific kind of French way of viewing male-to-female relationships. It involves freedom mixed with a notion of being chivalrous, which has stayed with us. It’s a kind of ‘free, playful seduction.’ That said, I think it’s a mistake to call wokeness a puritanical phenomenon. It is a puritanical movement, but it isn’t only a puritanical movement. It’s hedonistic too, but since our culture is hedonistic, it doesn’t perceive that.
Think about it: How often do feminists talk very publicly about their clitoris and orgasms? That’s not puritanical. That’s something else. Wokeness has this peculiar combination of maximum openness and repressive cancellations. You can have a young woman who goes out every night and has lots of sexual partners, but then the next week she has all of them canceled for microaggressions and false accusations of sexual impropriety. It’s bizarre. It’s both puritanism and hedonism maxed out. It’s schizophrenic.
In the U.S., wokeness began in academia but spread through media and popular culture. Is it the same in France?
Our academia is heavily woke, and only ever so slightly less so than the U.S.
We have many purely French cinematic productions, which are very left-leaning. We have a huge subsidized public culture sector, which is very pro-woke. Delphine Ernotte, the person in charge of French public television, explicitly said, when she was hired, that we have too many old white males on TV. Since French wokeness is so heavily subsidized, this does also imply that they are potentially one right-wing election away from being seriously threatened.
That said, there are some films coming out now which are ‘gently right-wing,’ and not woke. They tend to do very well. Maybe with market pressure, wokeness can be overcome. So, to sum it up, everything subsidized and bureaucratic is woke, and (with the exception of big American firms like Netflix) things produced for the mass audience are not.
In Hungary, where I live, conservative parents despise Anglo-American popular culture because it’s making their kids woke. Their kids are all on Netflix and on social media from the West. Is that playing a role in France with young people? Are they more open to English-language popular culture than previous generations?
The Americanization of our culture takes many forms. One of them is first names. These days, we have so many Kevins, Dylans, and Jordans in France. They’re all Marine Le Pen’s voters, basically. They’ve been heavily Americanized by TV series, even before the arrival of Netflix. Something like 50% of 18-35-year-olds in France go to McDonald’s once every month. Forty percent have either had their birthday there or attended someone else’s birthday party there. And 10% of them have worked at McDonald’s.
Here’s another example: recently, the French wokes have stopped finding French translations for key concepts. ‘Mansplaining’ is the same in French as in English. So is ‘the male gaze.’ And on the platform Twitch, you can listen to young French influencers playing video games, and every third word is in English. The borders between French and American culture are definitely getting more porous.
How does wokeness and race play out in France?
The usual narrative is that we in France were completely colorblind until five or ten years ago, when we got Americanized. I think that’s often a story the French Left tells itself, especially the old French Left. We had a movement in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, which was very strong, called ‘SOS Racisme,’ which was pushed by François Mitterrand, the socialist president. He basically shifted economically away from socialism, but to hide this huge turn from his electorate, he put social issues front and center. He helped push Jean-Marie Le Pen forward as a scarecrow figure. Le Pen wasn’t really a factor until Mitterrand made him into one in an attempt to divide the French Right.
The way the Left talks about SOS Racisme today is that it was this beautiful, universalist, colorblind thing. In fact, there was a great book published in 1993 by sociologist Paul Yonnet Voyage au centre du malaise français (who was marginalized for saying that SOS Racisme was actually a racialist movement) that demonstrates the opposite. The movement wasn’t saying that we must stop seeing colors. It was actually trying to promote non-white people in France by seeing race as a collective, but simply inverting the hierarchy.
Putting nonwhites on top?
Yes. We see this dynamic accelerating now. It was fascinating to discover this, because it’s precisely the analysis that American journalist Christopher Caldwell makes in his book The Age of Enlightenment, where he explains that the Civil Rights Acts was not colorblind at all. Instead of stopping racism, it found race everywhere and promoted discrimination in the hope that one day, it would end discrimination.
The Supreme Court is putting the brakes on some of this, but it is so ingrained in American culture now.
Yes, exactly. In my book, I put side by side this analysis of SOS Racisme in France in the ‘80s and ‘90s and Caldwell’s analysis of the Civil Rights Act in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. You can see the same thing happening in France, only twenty years after it happens in America. For some reason, it’s much easier to invert the victors and the victimized than to go for color-blind neutrality, yet that is how it was sold to many people.
There are some people in the U.S. who have a theory that one reason that ‘Big Business’ embraced wokeness is because Occupy Wall Street scared them. They decided that embracing cultural politics would keep the heat off of them to be more just economically.
Exactly. If you want to avoid electing Bernie Sanders post-2008, you go full woke. Vivek Ramswamany in Woke Inc. has this lovely passage where he shows how, organically, the slogans of Occupy in the streets started to change from economics to culture and race.
Here in France, the old French Left are trying to stay focused on economics, but the younger ones are much more focused on culture. The young woke will say that they’re fighting capitalism, but that’s not what drives them. I don’t think they understand how capitalistic they really are. Take OnlyFans, for instance. It’s literally selling your body online, but they will claim that it’s a form of ‘empowerment.’
How does wokeness deal with Islam in France?
Our whole public debate in France is basically the old Left versus the new Left, with the old Left saying, “We’ve got nothing to do with these guys.” Well, if that’s the case, why are they tearing you apart so easily? It’s not a convincing explanation. And on this question, there’s been a fascination within the French Left for the figure of the ‘other.’ In French, ‘l’Autre.’ This concept has been strong with us, thanks in great part to postmodern French thinkers. Matthieu Bock-Côté, in his book on multiculturalism as a political religion, says that the “great thing about the Other is that he isn’t us.” The idea is, “You’ll come over here and tell us how bad we are, and you’re very, very precious, because you can tell us where we failed with minorities.” It’s a sadomasochistic relationship.
Since the October 7 slaughter of Israeli Jews by Hamas, we have seen tens of thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrations in Europe and America and utterly shocking antisemitic statements and acts by young people who are normally ultra-sensitive to questions of race. This comes from a generation having been taught to judge all conflicts through the oppressed/oppressor framework. This has been an apocalypse, and the unveiling of the deep damage wokeness has done to our moral sense. Is the same thing happening in France?
I think so. There’s an interesting evolution underway, with some of our elites finally realizing that wokeness can go too far. We have seen students all around the West ripping down posters of missing Jewish babies, and they’re not all Muslim. Many of them are white. One way of understanding this is they have deeply imbibed Herbert Marcuse’s analysis, which says that if you’re faced by an all-powerful, all-evil system, you can do anything you need to do to get rid of it. And because Jews, on average, outperform people in other ethnic categories in the West, the woke see Jews as white for political purposes. And Asians too! So, if the system is racist, then justice permits you to be racist in return, to invert the hierarchy. If you say your enemy is Goliath, then you get to chuck stones at him and be the good guy. That sounds like a pretty good deal to many of them.
I wrote a book about the people who came to the West from communist countries. They began to pick up very early on the totalitarian nature of wokeness, even if they couldn’t fully articulate it. Did you find in your study of wokeness in France totalitarian elements?
In my book, I cite Animal Farm by George Orwell, which talks about revolution in the geometrical sense of the term. That is, you start at one point and then go full circle to end up where you started. The pigs in Animal Farm say, “We will eradicate man, and everything will be fine.” What drives them forward are negative objectives, fueled by resentment. In the very last scene, we have this powerful moment with the pigs and the humans celebrating together. The ‘revolution’ is accomplished, 360 degrees later.
I think this is what’s happening with wokeness today. Everything you see with them is defined negatively. What’s the most popular academic term? In the last few decades, ‘deconstruction,’ which is a chic way of saying destruction. How do they define themselves in one word? They say ‘antiracist.’ What do they do? They topple statues; they cancel people. This is all negative. They don’t build anything. Well, they might build a George Floyd statue. We’ll see how long that holds. Maybe they’ll find out that he misspoke to his girlfriend once, and they’ll burn the statue down. But this is negative, and this means we could predict the fact that they’ll go full circle.
I tell a story in my book about a crazy event in Canada where a woman ended up burning books for the sake of progress, of inclusivity. It’s literally an inclusive auto-da-fé! That’s Orwell’s pigs drinking alongside the men they were supposed to eradicate. And this is happening all the time. You will have a woke person who says “whiteness is a virus,” and to kill it, we must eliminate the hosts. If you swap out the word ‘blackness’ for ‘whiteness,’ you can change a Ku Klux Klan statement into a New York Times op-ed, and the whole thing will have gone full circle. The wokes are not seeking equality. They’re seeking inversion.
One interesting thing about the way wokeness has played between the U.S. and the UK is that the feminists in the UK have actually done a pretty effective job of pushing back on transgender. The feminists in the U.S., conversely, are still totally on the side of transgenderism. Louise Perry theorizes that if you look and see what the religious Right does, you can predict that the Left is going to take the opposite position because the religious Right must always lose. How was transgenderism dealt with in France, and how does that issue manifest in France?
Two things must be said first. France has not had its big Tavistock moment, and transgenderism hasn’t gone nearly as far ‘forward’ as it has in the U.S. and in the UK. It’s certainly growing, especially on TikTok, on social media, with a lot of young girls normalizing it. I think we are having the social contagion. But it’s still two or three times less big compared to what the Anglophone world suffers through.
Hopefully, with Sweden, Finland, and the UK going there and back again, we will save ourselves the trouble from attempting ‘full trans.’ With a bit of luck, we won’t have to buy two tickets and stay on the shore instead.
On your point on the religious Right, I think this shows a real problem with how the Left functions and how it has functioned for many decades. What the French Left says about itself is that it has these principles—laïcité, universalism, rationalism, neutrality, the scientific method, the République—which, on paper, are meant to be huge ideological bulwarks against the rise of wokeness. However, in practice, I think one of the stronger forces within the French Left is the question of negative unity: who are you fighting? Who do you hate? Who you are depends on who you hate, and they hate the Right, especially if it happens to be religious.
Let’s take the example of our former prime minister, Manuel Valls. Philosophically, he is from the old Left, and served under socialist President François Hollande. He was quite outspoken against Islam and insecurity. This made him be seen within the Left as being ‘right-wing,’ and he ended up being symbolically forced out of the Left without really changing his mind on anything. Hence, he left the country and tried to get elected in Spain. When he tried to return both within the borders of France and within those of the Left, he realized one of the two journeys was much harder to accomplish than the other.
He had a problem: how does one ‘become left-wing again’? If you were his spin doctor, what would you have advised him to do? One option could have been to write a left-wing political project with a few key measures (“This is what the Left should do: raise taxes on the rich, subsidize X, Y, Z…”). Or he could have gone for the classic ‘describe a historical left-wing figure in a book and hence implicitly position yourself as his successor.’ A book on Jean Jaurès, for instance! But that is not what he did. He wrote a book against the right-wing devil of the moment, Éric Zemmour.
I think that’s an interesting way to see what the Left truly is today. It is being against an enemy, not for a common good. This is why I think the Left in France in the end isn’t that good at fighting against wokeness, because they both share a common enemy, and that matters a lot for them. Apparently, what you hate (and not what you love) determines who you are.
The prominence of this scapegoating mechanism is very prominent within wokeness. Do you believe it is an old feature of the French Left?
I think it goes back several decades. We have French left-wing politicians who say they entered politics because of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s second place in the presidential elections of 2002. In doing so, they explicitly admit they entered the political arena to demolish a party or a person, and not to build anything. And as Orwell points out in Animal Farm, if you are bound by negative unity, if you’re only fighting against and not for, you end up reproducing what you thought you were fighting against. Look at what happened to antisemitism.
In the U.S., one of the striking qualities of this whole debate is how weak the organized Right has been. The Republican Party and the think tanks have been pathetic. The real resistance has come from activists like Chris Rufo and Billboard Chris, a Canadian. I was asking a Republican pollster who was in Budapest recently from Washington about this theory I have that Republican politicians at the national level won’t talk about these topics because they’re terrified of the media calling them bigots and terrified of the donor class, which is more socially liberal. He agreed. So what has this been like in France? Where has the opposition to wokeness come from? And how successful have they been?
Nobody knew what the term meant in 2021. I am glad to have contributed to making it enter the public sphere in July 2021 with the report I wrote for the French think-tank Fondapol (Fondation pour l’Innovation Politique). And then in the autumn of 2021, after that, we saw French Minister of Education Commission Jean-Michel Blanquer use the term.
I feel that in France, the real crunch time, the real moment of truth, has yet to arrive on wokeness. We haven’t yet had a huge legal precedent or a huge political fight, only skirmishes. Because I don’t think it’s quite big enough as of now. I don’t think the electorate is quite aware of it enough yet either. I would wager that for the 2027 presidential election, it will be a big and important debate, and politicians will be asked to position themselves on this debate, but that wasn’t truly the case for the 2022 election for instance.
Trump voters didn’t seem to care that he didn’t accomplish much. All they cared about was that he ‘triggered the libs.’ The woke kept marching through the institutions, saying that ‘Trump is horrible, look how horrible he is,’ and the respectable professionals fell right in line with that. I think that Britain is probably lost. It’s not going to recover from this. Ireland certainly won’t recover. I think America is very doubtful. What are the prospects for France?
I change my mind on this depending on my mood. If there is hope, it lies necessarily in the youth. For better or for worse, the big centrist ‘bloc,’ governed today by Macron, has a clear expiry date in the polls. It won’t survive the death of the Baby Boomers. It might not even survive the end of Macron as a president in 2027, but we’ll see on that point. The French youth is far more polarized on most questions than older generations. The French and Italian youth are clearly more right-wing than their American and English counterparts, in very significant proportions. The French youth likes Marine Le Pen (and especially her young protégé Jordan Bardella), for instance, but it is also heavily de-Christianized, Americanized, uprooted, etc. They are also the victims of a failed education system. Whether they can reconnect with their culture and past is an open question.
Another aspect is our ruling class. Our elites tend to be quite focused on copying the U.S. or neighboring elites. I think our elites are deeply subscribed to the notion (implicitly or explicitly) that history has a direction. If wokeness was to become terribly unfashionable around the world (or at least in New York), they won’t want to be the last ones to realize that. I think we’re blessed to have other nations which have paradoxically sacrificed themselves for us by trying out wokeness first. This means that people like me in France can say, “They’ve tried going full transgender. This is what happened. It was an absolute catastrophe. Hence, let’s not even try it.” It means that my arguments that are arguably theoretical can be made quite practical: “Look at what Harvard has become!” I think that can help France. Communism collapsed rather globally, for instance; it wasn’t just Russia.
That said, we still have to offer a different unifying narrative for the younger generation. No one has even been convinced to let go of a safety jacket in the middle of the ocean by merely being told that the jacket was carcinogenic. They need to be offered a tale, a story; a boat which is going somewhere. We have to say there is a better common meta narrative to bind you with people around you, to give you a sense of community (and not simply an ‘online community’), a sense of belonging, except it’s going to be to aim for a common good rather than to aim for a common enemy.
And finally, there’s quite a strong (small but dynamic) young French Catholic Right, which practices the Faith, which is quite well linked together, quite dynamic, and which could potentially form a future elite. In a world of fragmentation, people who have a common cultural narrative possess a huge advantage over the rest. They can bind together, share contacts and addresses. That said, the cultural mainstream will shift away from Christianity in the short term, for sure, so it will be tricky for them to get their message across to the masses without sounding too otherworldly.
You talked about the young Catholics on the Right here in the U.S. It’s hard to generalize, but there have been a lot of churches that have failed to stand against wokeness. In Germany, for example, the churches are totally woke. Is it possible to speak in general about the churches in France?
I think there’s a huge divide between nations that have been historically Protestant and those who have been historically Catholic. That doesn’t mean all cultural Catholic countries and their church have resisted well. Comparatively speaking, the French church isn’t as woke as the German church or Canadian church. You hear English bishops talking about systemic racism, for instance, and we don’t have this. Our bishops tend to be old and very meek, very shy (especially during COVID), but rarely woke or far Left per se.
By abandoning liberal norms of fairness, wokeness has given the far Right permission to do the same. They’re calling forth the demons of white supremacy again. Is there something similar in France going on?
It’s a tricky question. In The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Jason Manning and Bradley Campbell, the authors use an interesting example. They mention wealthy students from one of the Ivy League who go to see a rural Trump voter who’s poor and whose whole community is on one of the drugs devastating these areas. The students tell this man that he is ‘privileged.’ Well, it’s incredibly tempting for him to flip that accusation around.
However, this means the question of ‘privilege’ (which is a deeply egalitarian framing of things) becomes the framing to be used. And then once you’re in a frame, it’s very hard to get out of the frame. Thus if the same thing is happening with race, you will find a white guy saying, “Privileged? Well, look at all the things black people get away with!” We’ve all heard of George Floyd. No one has heard of Tony Timpa, [a white man] who basically died in at least the same way, if not worse, as Douglas Murray demonstrates in The War on the West. And so also, the race becomes a frame which you inverse, and I think it’s the point Manning and Campbell make repeatedly, which is “opposition leads to imitation.”
The young generation didn’t have the framings of the generations before, which were, I think, more nuanced and subtle, or at least not a strict reduction of all social life to oppressor and oppressed categories. Whereas the young people will probably just be left with a choice, which is, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed? Is it a good thing or a bad thing to be an oppressor? That will mean a choice between the Nietzschean Right and the woke Left, between pre-Christianity and post-Christianity, between venerating strength and venerating weakness. The middle ground is venerating strength deployed in the service of the weak: the knight in shining armor, wielding his sword to defend the orphan and the widow. But in the current framing, that sounds peculiar.
I also think, for better or for worse, we’re leaving all the liberal consensus behind. We still partly adhere to a form of ‘live and let live’ to some extent, but the idea of neutrality, for instance, so key in the liberal paradigm (absolute neutrality of state, philosophical neutrality, the radical fact/value divide), is clearly dying if not already dead. Out of this death of neutrality, there are only two ways out, two possible stances. One which is postmodern, and the other which is pre-modern. The postmodern stance wants neutrality to be dead to say “everything is power” and simply arbitrary: “Stop saying the law is neutral; the law is nothing but a creation by the powerful as a tool for arbitrary power, etc.”
The second option is to say yes; neutrality does not exist, and morality is everywhere. Everything is normative. Everything is a story, everything is symbolic, and the strict separation between facts and value doesn’t exist. That said, that does not mean every story is worth its salt; not all stories are equal, not all moralities are equal. And let us enter into normative debates around what morality is, what kind of community we should have. Just because neutrality does not exist does not mean that everything is arbitrary. And let’s have this discussion on what is the common good.
Don’t you think that this polarization is going to weaken democracy and tear nations apart?
Shanto Iyengar et Masha Krupenkin wrote a paper in 2018 called The Strengthening of Partisan Affect which demonstrates that it is hostility towards the other party that makes Americans more inclined to participate in the electoral process. It seems to me that at that point you have an entire nation dominated by an impulse of sheer negation; ‘trigger the libs’ versus ‘eradicate the deplorables.’. People get up in the morning to vote—not for something, but to destroy the lives of others.
Once you have reached that stage, then any kind of coherence becomes highly improbable. Once you’re bound by negative unity, as intersectionality does, the incoherence is everywhere all the time, but you just no longer see it because you’re fighting against the same monster. That’s how you end up with the slogan “Queers for Palestine.” Why do activists say this without realizing that it doesn’t work? It’s because there’s a common enemy, the Jew, which blinds them and binds them in their hatred to any internal contradictions.
It seems to me that the fundamental impulse of left-wing politics is “f*** you, dad.”
Yes. Jordan Peterson says that the tyrannical father is the only archetype they can understand and project on the West. They don’t understand that [there] can also exist such a thing as a tyrannical mother, that there can also be a benign king.
That said, many of them would probably be fine with an ‘antiracist’ dictatorship. There is a kind of ‘short termism’ in current politics that is linked to the destruction of the deferral of gratification. Democracy requires patience. Sure, we lost this time, but we might win next time. Whereas dictatorship appeals to the “I want it NOW.” We’re no longer capable of planning in the long term at all, which is a catastrophe. Even the notion of progress, in a sense, has died out within progressive circles. We don’t truly believe tomorrow will be better. Your last book uses the phrase “nostalgia of the future.” We all collectively seem to be saying, “tomorrow used to be better.” It’s the same paradox. It’s nostalgia for when the future was great.
What’s the role of narcissism within wokeness?
Let’s take two woke claims and try to find coherence between them. One of them is Joan of Arc being interpreted as being ‘nonbinary’ by the Globe Theater. One could have thought that they could have run with ‘strong, female character.’ But no, that was yesterday’s progress, and we don’t like anything that belongs to yesterday. The other event is Shakespeare being described (due to the cross-dressing which takes place in As You Like It) as a big advocate of the transgender movement. The fact that he is a 16th-century playwright does not appear to deter this line of analysis.
What is the coherence between these two claims? It seems to me that the young Western narcissistic mind today has two options when faced with a huge historical figure. One of them is to say, “This person does not agree with me and therefore is canceled.” So Joan of Arc has been canceled a few times because she happens to be a figure of a Catholic Right. Shakespeare is pretty much canceled weekly by now. That’s option one.
The second option is to say, “I can adore this huge figure of the West because they happen to agree with what I believe in 2024.” I can still like them because they’re so clever that they are blessed with the intelligence to agree with me today. I think deep down the woke mentality is narcissistic because it needs the outside world (classics and huge Western figures) to tell them that they are right. And if these figures don’t do that, they’re canceled. Hence, the self has to absorb the outside world as a prolongation of itself. Narcissus cannot let the outside world disagree with him.
However, what the classics should do is slap us across the face and make us become what we are not already. That’s the third option. The third way between the two options I described would be to listen humbly to what they have to tell us, not to cancel nor to absorb them.
People have no purpose anymore. They live for shopping, sex, and social media. My father was born during the Great Depression and became a parent in the ‘60s, when there was still a whole lot of optimism. I feel that has changed.
Allan Bloom says in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind that his relativistic students were wildly optimistic. That sounds alien to us today, yet it was only a few decades ago. Progressives no longer believe in progress.
Perhaps a metaphor to symbolize both the areas of continuity and disruption between older and younger progressives could be the following: imagine you are a train in a tunnel. Both generations of progressives agree that there is no driving backwards, that the back of the tunnel has collapsed. All progressives partake in what C.S. Lewis calls ‘chronological snobbery.’ Everything from the past is de facto dead, and if it isn’t, it should be killed.
However, whereas older progressives believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, the newer ones believe both ends have collapsed. The future, especially climate-wise, means only one thing for them: an apocalypse. The green movements have deeply altered progressivism from the inside.
So now we are in a tricky situation of having been fed a narrative of progress, which is our only common narrative, whilst being deeply incapable of believing in any kind of progress. When someone says “that is new!” they mean “that is good,” which is a remnant of that myth but deprived from any clear direction. That leaves us with movement for movement’s sake, novelty for novelty’s sake, but lacking a telos. The idea of ‘gender fluid’ epitomizes this tendency.
Yes, just as there’s a difference between a pilgrim and a tourist. The pilgrim is going on a fixed route. The route has meaning, and he’s going where others have gone. You have familiar stops. The tourist goes wherever he wants, wherever his whims take him. The tourist has to constantly keep moving in order to avoid boredom. We live in a tourist society.
Yes, and it’s the image of consumerism as well. The theologian William Cavanaugh wrote a book on that topic called Being Consumed. He argues that contra to what we often believe, it’s not that the consumerist loves material possessions too much. He who loves and cares for his ancestral family mansion is not consumerist in doing so, for instance. Instead, consumerism implies a detachment from material possessions because you always have to spend time throwing out things and stop trying to bother repairing them when they break. Consumerism constantly needs new stuff to replace the old stuff. Hence, the ultimate consumerist experience, argues Cavanaugh, is not actually acquiring objects, but shopping, that moment before you buy, where you could potentially possess anything.
