Many Roads to the Mountaintop

A friend whose politics are to the left of my own calls me out. “I don’t like the way you use ‘woke’ so casually and derisively. What’s going on with that?”

Your favorite search engine will tell you of the history of the expression “Woke,” and that it is rooted in Black culture. What began as a way to describe a way of seeing intersecting oppressions and the reality of power became, in time, a slur. This has happened to other expressions too; consider the evolution of “politically correct” (or simply PC); what began as an earnest description of a certain kind of left-wing politics became a byword for preening hypersensitivity. It is often so.

Writing on his Substack last week, the celebrated poet Saeed Jones offered his definition:

The way I see it “woke” combines the experience of having an awakening (“something or someone woke me up”) with the alertness that follows (“I can’t or won’t go back to sleep; I’m awake now.”) In that way, “woke” is an incredible concept, right? It’s about having a transformation and then changing one’s posture in response. Knowing what I know now, I’ve got to be on the lookout for myself and others. Ain’t no going back.

That’s a fine description. It’s also a summation of why I find the term so grating.

In another life, when I taught European history, I lectured on the European Enlightenment. While celebrating the achievements of everyone from Locke to Hume, Descartes to Voltaire, I pointed out the obvious. When we frame a movement as “enlightened,” we imply that all that came before was in darkness. The name itself is a provocation. Come with us, it says, if you want to see. Stay behind and be blind.

It was Immanuel Kant who first used the term Enlightenment (Aufklärung in his native German) in a famous 1784 essay; in it, he contrasts the enlightened with those who choose to ignore the movement’s myriad blessings. “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives,” Kant laments. Those who fail to deploy reason as Kant and his fellow philosophes thought right? Lazy cowards, the lot of them!

If the opposite of enlightenment is darkness, then the opposite of being woke is, of course, to remain stubbornly asleep. In both cases, Woke and Enlightened contain within their very names a sneering dismissal of the fools, ignoramuses, and bigots who will not wake and will not see. If you do not go along with the Woke or Enlightened agenda… well, you know what you are.

Saeed’s essay suggests that once woke, one is “on the lookout for myself and others.” In other words, it’s a call to evangelism. Now that I’m awake, I’ve got to wake other people up; now that I know how to reason in a way that would please Kant or Hume, I must teach others to do the same; now that I have come to know Jesus as my savior, I must tell others of his amazing grace. That’s not, in of itself, objectionable. We get excited about something – a new insight, a new restaurant, a new religion, a new social media app – we want others to share our excitement. If something has made our lives better, we want our loved ones to have a chance at the same. The question, always, is how we handle it when others do not see as we see.

When others do not awaken to the same truths, or come to different conclusions about science or nutrition or God or sex, how do we respond? Do we admit that the truth to which we have awakened may not be universal? Do we concede that there are many roads to the mountaintop? Or do we double down on the sense that our way is the One True Way and our insight the Very Best Insight? Do we find a way to hold on to our commitments and our excitement while acknowledging the legitimacy of other commitments and other excitements?

It is good to be certain. I am certain that my children, Heloise and David Schwyzer, are the two most wonderful children that have ever lived. I love them even more than I love your children! My certainty of my love for my children, however, is radically and wonderful subjective. If you loved my kids more than you loved your own, I would be concerned, and genuinely unnerved. There is no universal truth about the best boy or best girl in the whole wide world. There is only a relative perception.

The Woke, the Enlightened, the Elect, the Saved? They mistake the subjective for the universal, the relative for the objective. They are drunk on the hubris that says - to paraphrase the Apostle in a different context – I wish that all men and women could think like me! If only everyone were vegan as I am vegan! If only everyone knew Jesus! If only everyone read Marx! If only everyone could let go of their sexual hangups! If only everyone gave up sugar! If only everyone stood with Palestine! If only everyone recycled! If only everyone were as awake, as enlightened, as informed, as empathetic, as well-read and well-bred as me! If only.

There is nothing wrong with maturing, or learning, or growing up. There is nothing wrong with a journey of self-discovery. There is nothing wrong with finding your own personal path to the summit, and sticking to that trail; there’s nothing wrong, even, with telling other people, when they ask, what road it is you walk and why. There is something deeply arrogant about declaring that all who do not walk as you walk or see as you see are lazy, ignorant, bigoted, and damned.

If you are Woke, then I am asleep. If you are Enlightened, then I am in the shadow. If you are sure of your Salvation, then perhaps the Lord and I have other arrangements. It is true that I have been especially hard on Wokeism in recent years, because its sneering certainties and ruthless self-righteousness have been ascendant. My objection, however, isn’t to the ideology. It’s to the fervor and urgency with which the Woke have made their claims. My cause isn’t of the right, or of the left. It’s of the modest, the doubtful, the gently tolerant. It’s the humility that says, my truth need not be yours, nor yours, mine.

That kind of relativism is very out of fashion. Which is why, perhaps, it deserves a defense. Not a vigorous defense, because that would necessitate a kind of passionate certainty. Just a mild plea to consider the possibility that we are all, in our own ways, equally and wonderfully awake.