The woke epidemic

The woke virus is spreading relentlessly through society and destroying the institutions of liberal democracy. By Nick Cater.

This is an edited transcript of a speech Nick Cater delivered to the Mosman Liberal Party Branch.

I’ve been asked to talk about the virus that is spreading relentlessly through our society, a virus that is mutating into new forms, against which we do not yet have a fully effective vaccine.

The virus that we have come to know as woke was created in a postmodern laboratory, took hold in our university campuses and is spreading out of control in the rest of the community.

I’m sorry to say that we don’t yet have an effective vaccine for the woke virus - and any hope of living in a zero woke community in the immediate future has failed.

So tonight, all I have to offer is a booster shot that, with luck, will raise your immunity over Christmas - sorry, the holiday season - which is shaping up to the be wokest on record.

The European Union’s commissioner for equality, Ursula von der Leyen, has issued draft guidelines on the language that should not be used at this time of year if we are to be truly inclusive.

It listed “Christmas time can be stressful,” as a phrase to avoid. Under “do this instead”, it suggested phrases such as “holiday times can be stressful”.

It also told officials to use the phrases “first name”, “forename” or “given name”, rather than “Christian name” and to avoid “names that are typically from one religion” in examples and anecdotes. For example,  instead of saying “Maria and John are an international couple” we should refer to  “Malika and Julio”.

We must avoid gender-specific pronouns and gendered words and phrases such as “chairman”, “ladies and gentleman” or “man-made”.

Father Christmas is proving particularly problematic, not just on account of his name, but because he is old, white and male, and almost certainly transphobic.

The Dutch made moves towards inclusivity years ago by bringing Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, into the story. Swarte Piet is a person of colour who helps Sinterklaas hand out the presents.

But Swarte Piet has herself been the target of a vicious woke attack for perpetuating negative stereotypes of black people during the colonial era.

She has been condemned by the United Nations for promoting “discriminatory practices and stereotypes”.

Piet’s defenders are claiming it’s all misunderstanding. Piet’s black face is not culturally appropriated, it was acquired from scrambling down chimneys. But now that the Dutch Parliament has passed a bill to rid the country of coal by 2030, that weak excuse can only last so long.

Attention to inclusivity and diversity are particularly important, we are told, in the matter of toy giving, since early exposure to problematic playthings can turn the sweetest child into a life-long bigot.

That’s a maybe, but I for one refused to be lectured on morality by a mass-produced plastic doll called Barbie.

Barbie has recorded an insufferable, YouTube video to talk about racism with her friend Nikki - who is naturally a doll of colour. 

“It’s important to have ongoing conversations about standing up to racism,” says Barbie. Apparently, Barbie’s non-gender specific birth parent, Mattel Inc, has higher ambitions than the mere generation of a return to shareholders. Its mission is to “leverage the brand to help girls to understand that there is a huge movement going on in the fight against racism, why people are marching together and the importance of reading and learning more about Black history.”

We could go on of course. Thomas the Tank Engine can no longer be regarded merely as an anthropomorphised version of an E2 class locomotive from the 1920s. 

Thomas, we are told, “represents a conservative political ideology that punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change, and relegates females to supportive roles.” 

I grant that of the 49 characters in Thomas, only eight are female. They include a high-maintenance diesel locomotive with tickets on herself and a couple of whiny carriages dragged along helplessly in Thomas’ wake.

Thomas’ critics complain there are no suitable role models for females.

I grew up with the Thomas books, although I have to say I never regarded Thomas as a role model for anyone. He is a fictional talking train after all.

And finally let me remind you, to avoid any nasty woke surprises at Christmas time - the popular spud-shaped lump of plastic known for the last 70 years as Mr Potato Head, has this year been cleansed of toxic masculinity by Hasbro, and will be marketed simply as Potato Head.

All this in a year in which we’ve witnessed the de-problematisation of Coon Cheese and popular chewy sweets formally known as redskins.

I can make no promises, but let me at least try to explain for the next 10 minutes what I think is going on. 

First, we are witnessing something on a whole new scale from what we used to call political correctness.

Underlying wokeness is a dangerous, utopian ideology that has its roots in Marxism and is hellbent on destroying the institutions of liberal democracy, the Christian religion and the family and replacing it with something far more authoritarian and stratified.

Its intellectual credentials, such as they are, are found in the world of Social Justice studies spelt with a capital S and a capital J. It adopts the post-modern concepts that reality is a social construct, that truth is subjective, and that the course of history is pre-determined by hegemonic power structures.

The scholarship, if we can call it that, incorporates critical race theory, post-colonial theory, queer theory, fat studies, transgender theory, and a range of related “theories” that have been reified and turned into fact.

The most thorough examination of this phenomenon so far is the book Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, in which they describe social justice theory as “a kind of Theory of Everything, a set of unquestionable truths with a capital T.” The Gospel of Social Justice is contained in a series of academic texts “that express with absolute certainty that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs, that sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, that language can be lethal violence, that denial of gender identity is killing people, that seek to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonised.”

The crucial question we are still struggling to answer is how did this abstruse cult-like form of social philosophy spread beyond obscure academic journals to be embedded in our cultural, political and corporate institutions.

We often talk about the long march through the institutions, a phrase coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke around 1967 to describe his strategy of subverting society by infiltrating institutions such as the professions.

But while that serves as a useful metaphor for what has been happening over recent decades, the idea of some grand fiendish plan playing out like a chess game is inherently improbable.

Let me put forward three credible explanations to help explain the seemingly inexplicable spread of the woke delusion.

First, Woke can be seen as a status symbol, a totem that identifies membership of a tribe of educated people who see the world in clearer terms than others. The theory of luxury beliefs was framed by American social psychologist Rob Henderson two years ago. Woke can be regarded as a niche product, like quinoa, kale, or goji berries, that proved strangely appealing to the expanding class of hipster graduates who have emerged from bloated universities with sparkling credentials but little real knowledge.

In common with privileged people throughout the ages, they are compelled to signal their superior worth. Once they would have adopted luxury goods as conspicuous displays of wealth. But with material goods now cheaper, and luxury items more widely available, they are drawn instead to a set of luxury beliefs.

Sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Conspicuous consumption has given way to conspicuous convictions as a status marker.

Second is the shrinking influence of religion and with it the Judeo-Christian principles that shaped the once-unchallenged social conventions. In a religious society, a common faith is the basis for a common moral understanding of the world, our obligations to one another, and the measure by which to judge good or bad character.

The absence of religion leads not to enlightenment, but to moral confusion and uncertainty. In this sociological sense at least, Wokeism is a religion, a set of unquestioned truths and sacred objects that form the framework for an internally coherent world view.

Wokeism is avowedly secular and its adherents would bristle at any comparison between Social Justice Theory and and a religious creed.  

And yet it displays many of the characteristics of a religious sect or moral believing community. The truth of social justice theory is accepted without empirical justification. It is simply assumed. In other words, it has the same epistemological basis as superstition or magic, no more and no less. 

The penalties against dissent that Wokeism employs stem from a familiar religious instinct that has surfaced throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to the intolerance of the closed Brethren. 

The phenomenon was recognised by sociologist Emile Durkheim in his seminal work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. “The very forcefulness with which society acts against dissidence, whether by moral censure or physical repressions, helps to strengthen this dominance,” he writes, “and at the same time forcefully proclaims the ardour of the shared conviction … it is felt even by those who do not yield to it.”

Third, wokeism offers the allure of virtue, rewarding believers with a special state of grace. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. 

In the words of economist Thomas Sowell, “People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.”

This moral force also accounts for its power to silence every opposing thought.

Defining yourself as being against racism, sexism and homophobia and for a just and inclusive society is an effective way to ensure your opponents keep their mouths shut. Since those who object lay themselves open to being racist, sexist, insensitive and intolerant. The assertion of morality messes with the conservative heads who after all are equally committed to a society free of intolerance, and genuinely committed to the ideal of egalitarianism, the principle that holds that every person is of equal moral worth, deserves equal respect and - as far as the unequal distribution of fortune allows - equal opportunity.

Conservatives appear hesitant to condemn woke’s excesses, the Black Lives Matter movement being a prime example. The pious display of taking the knee was allowed to creep in to public sporting events rather too easily, despite its pernicious narrative of racial essentialism.

The challenge for conservatives is to find the courage to resist this pernicious ideology that weaponises the language of equality, diversity and inclusiveness in search of an ideal that is fundamentally unequal, monotonous and exclusive. 

It is an ideology which holds that immutable biological attributes like skin colour and gender are no longer irrelevant to one’s character, but central in defining their moral worth. As many have pointed out, it is anathema to the philosophy of the civil rights movement and the sentiments expressed by Martin Luther King Jnr.

It is fatalistic, disempowering and illiberal, depriving individuals of the agency to change their lives for better or for worse and denying them the right to equal respect.

The hesitancy of conservatives reflects, perhaps, an absence of certainty about their own convictions, and why it is that social justice is only served through individuals, not as members of an imagined class.

Clearly, we need to reaffirm the fundamental principles of liberalism, as articulated by Robert Menzies, to reassure ourselves that we are on solid ground.

We can also gain confidence by looking beyond the noisy inner circle of woke zealots and draw upon the popular wisdom of the quiet Australians.

Wokeism is anything but mainstream opinion, and silence should not be taken as consent. Earlier this year we conducted a poll of 1000 Australians from Compass Polling. 

We asked Australians: “Do you think that our larrikin Australian sense of humour has been destroyed by activists motivated by identify politics and political correctness?”

Seven out of 10 Australians said yes. Eight out of 10 (82 per cent) Coalition voters agreed and so did the majority of Labor voters. Only Greens voters disagreed - 59 per cent to 41 per cent of Greens.

We asked Australians about a move by the National Health Service in the UK to force midwives to stop using the language of womanhood. It is claimed that words such as mother, breastfeeding and breast milk could offend so-called trans and non-binary birthing people. We asked:

“Do you think that our own health service (Medicare) should adopt the same policy?”

This time, 85 per cent of Australians said no and even Greens supporters were overwhelmingly against the idea, at 69 per cent.

Political correctness has been making inroads into the corporate world, where brand managers have faced pressure to rename well known Australian products including Golden Gaytime, Coon Cheese and Mr Potato Head.

We asked Australians if buying a Golden Gaytime icecream makes you a homophobe, if buying Coon Cheese makes you a racist, or if calling the Potato Head toy “Mr” makes you sexist?

Four out of five Australians do not think that buying such products makes you a bigot. 

Which suggests that the people who set the rules about political correctness are out of touch with the views of everyday Australians and too influenced by noisy activists. 

Far from consenting to the doctrine of woke, the vast majority of Australians are silently seething, angry that their view of the world is dismissed as ignorant or even sinful. They are looking for leadership from conservatives, just as the people of Poland looked for leadership from the church and labour unions in the 1980s to give them confidence to stand up to Soviet communism.

It would be premature to argue that we are reaching peak wokeness. Fresh nuttiness will undoubtedly surface next year. Its most zealous adherents will never admit to their own foolishness. Few of Moscow’s intellectual fellow travellers in Australia have ever expressed regrets and the failed ideology they supported has morphed into other variants.

But popular consent is crumbling, as the fate of Europe’s Christmas language rules shows. The EU this week withdrew the document after a barrage of opposition from European leaders including Emmanuel Macron, and some damning words from the Pope.

The Holy Father deplored the “fad” of “watered down secularism”. He said, “In history, many dictatorships have tried to do these things,” explicitly stating that he was “thinking of Napoleon, the Nazi dictatorship, the Communist one,” and adding that, “it is something that throughout history has not worked.”