Author: Nick Huo

On the university’s resource page, 

Too many people whose expertise are not in the social sciences are making too many false statements on society and its structures.

Arguments should not harm people. If people are harmed by arguments, then it is probably a sign that the person hearing it is not in good shape mentally.

Wokeism, to me, is like the tradition of making factual claims that are actually faith claims. They either assume what they are claiming is true beforehand or not care to dig deep enough into the evidence.

It is extremely hard to understand society and find “truth” about it.

The real intellectual way is to not assume anything and withhold judgments or claims, until one has gone through enough rigorous research and being confident in one’s understanding of the topic.

Wokeism, a social justice movement that has gained popularity in recent years, is heavily influenced by the ideas of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his work, Nietzsche questioned the concept of truth and the notion that there is a single, objective truth that all individuals should strive towards. Instead, he argued that the pursuit of truth is entwined with the pursuit of power, and that individuals and groups use narratives of truth to persuade others to behave in ways that serve their own interests.

Mark Mitchell, in his book Power and Purity, asserts that Nietzsche believed that the only thing that all individuals are truly pursuing is “the will to power.” This, according to Mitchell, is the true “bedrock” of human behavior and the key to understanding why individuals and groups engage in moralizing and identity politics. In other words, the pursuit of power is the driving force behind wokeism and other social justice movements.

However, Nietzsche’s own writings do not support this interpretation. Rather than seeing the will to power as an all-encompassing force, Nietzsche viewed it as a tool that individuals could use to shape their own personalities and overcome internal struggles. In this sense, the will to power is more akin to willpower or self-control than it is to a universal truth.

Joshua Mitchell, in his book Identity Politics and the New Tribalism, offers a different perspective on the origins of wokeism. He argues that the decline of Christianity in the western world has left a void in people’s lives, and that wokeism and other social justice movements have filled this void by offering a new moral framework. This framework, based on the idea of “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities, provides individuals with a sense of belonging and a way to categorize the world and the people in it.

But this moralizing approach, according to Mitchell, is ultimately destructive. It divides people into hostile camps and keeps them constantly at odds with one another. Instead of engaging in identity politics and moralizing, Mitchell argues that the state should focus on raising competent citizens and leaving moral issues to individuals and their communities. Only by moving beyond the divisive language of wokeism can society truly progress.

Power and Purity

Wokeism, like communism and the new left movements of the past, is a quasi-religion centered around a single set truth. In the case of wokeism, this truth is moral absolutism, the belief that there are certain things that are inherently good and others that are inherently bad. Adherents to wokeism are expected to ascribe to these moral absolutes and actively work to root out any perceived instances of immorality in society.

At first glance, this might seem to align with the non-relativist worldviews of certain religions, such as Puritan Christianity. However, while Puritans were serious about their beliefs and strict in their moral code, they understood that salvation took place in the afterlife, not on Earth. In contrast, wokeism and other quasi-religions like communism believe in the possibility of redemption and transformation on Earth.

This focus on earthly redemption is perhaps why wokeism has been able to gain a foothold among the intelligentsia, who are attracted to the idea of using their intellect and education to bring about positive change in the world. However, as we have seen with communism and the new left, this pursuit of a single set truth can quickly turn into moral totalitarianism, with those who do not adhere to the prescribed moral code being ostracized or silenced.

This is evident in the way that wokeism promotes self-expression and inclusivity, yet at the same time aggressively fights against any views that differ from its own. This type of identity politics ultimately leads to a form of moral puritanism where anyone who does not conform to the woke moral code is deemed unacceptable.

The question then arises: why do people believe in these quasi-religions, and how can we explain the decline in religiosity among the younger generations? One possible explanation is that, in a world where objective truth is increasingly seen as relative, people are drawn to belief systems that offer a sense of moral certainty. Additionally, the rise of individualism and the decline of traditional institutions may have led people to seek out alternative sources of meaning and purpose.

However, as history has shown us, the pursuit of moral absolutism and purity often leads to destructive outcomes. It is important for individuals to critically examine their beliefs and the sources of their moral framework, rather than blindly adhering to the latest ideology or movement. 

Some notes below:

Truth is used as tools to gain power

Relativism

• All claims depend on the position? 

Puritan Christianity vs. Nietzsche 

Christianity has set morality standards

• Newer religions and movements attempt to strip away christianity yet keep the part about there being things that are good and bad.

Wokeism is similar to communism or social justice movements we studied earlier

• There is one set truth. Here the truth is morality. Certain things are good, others are bad. And people must ascribe to these moralities. 
• In earlier studies of communism, the one set truth is that all societies will eventually enter communism. And also communism viewed that there is only one truth: the proletariat truth is right, the bourgeha truth is bad and corrupted.
• There is no such thing as relativism. No to each their own. They all eventually become secular.

How are smart people adhering to wokeism?

Christain worldview – non-relativist.

• Puritans were very serious about what they believed
• They have to either believe in their “common truth” or be expelled.

While both religion and quasi-religion / gnosticism have certain redemption outcomes, the difference is that most religions understand salvation takes place in another world, but gnosticisms believe that the redemption should happen on earth. 

• This is why communists believed that they should be actively trying to revolutionize and change the societies, so that all societies will reach communism.

Self-expression is the source of sacredness

• Ad

Why would those Middlebury students believe that a talk can be so harmful?

• Like Gad Saad’s argument – there is a trend of over-protection (trigger warnings) that actually in turn make people more sensitive. Because people see them not often enough in regular life, they might misinterpret some usual unharmful statements as harmful.

Wokeism seems to be somewhat contradictory

• They claim to be promoting expression, yet for the views different from their own, they try hard to fight against it.

Wokeism: identity politics

• Moral puritanism

Moral totalitarianism produce quite the opposite outcome

Communism -> new left -> wokeism

Question

• So we have talked a lot in class about how wokeism is similar to communism and the new left movements that we studied earlier.
• But, I still have this question about why people really believe in these quasi-religions. 
• Why do people believe in it? Why do people think that 
• Or, why do people believe in religions in general? Also, how can we explain the decline in religiosity in the new generations?

The reading for this week was on 1620, a book written in response to the 1619 project published by the New York Times. As stated in the 1619 project, it is an attempt to reconstruct American history. It claims that, instead of the currently recognized founding year of the united states, 1619 should be the actual founding date, as that was when slavery was first brought on America. As we understand it, the 1619 project is not merely presenting an alternate view on history, but rather actually trying to persuade people that America was founded in 1619 with slavery being its core foundation.

However, from our analysis of the intellectual social class and the rise of wokeism, we see that the 1619 project is yet another example of wokeism. It fits into what we have learned and defined as wokeism. The reading – 1620 – points out its problems, and we learn more about why wokeism is problematic.

The most crucial problem is that the 1619 project is filled with historic errors. Aside from the oversight in the fact checking process and ignoring professional historian advice before publishing, the 1619 project cited little actual material historic evidence in presenting their argument.

The author responded about the factual flaws with “history has many and changing interpretations.” However, this is also precisely a huge part of the problem here, and about wokeism. History should be based on fact. But if you are just trying to present another interpretation of history, then it shouldn’t be published in the New York Times with the attempt to reconstruct American history and to persuade people that America was founded on slavery. 

Furthermore, the 1619 project falls into the postmodernist framework, which denies the existence of definitive truth and asserts that truth is provisional. This approach is problematic because it allows for multiple interpretations and privileges certain perspectives over others. It also has a Marxist edge, seeking to liberate the oppressed.

Another issue with the 1619 project is its use of the term dehumanization. The term emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries in the context of the civil rights movement. However, in the case of slavery, slave owners were not attempting to dehumanize their slaves, but rather to extract labor from them. In fact, slave owners often tried to convert slaves to Christianity and understood that they were human beings, not property.

• It has many historical errors
  • The author’s response:.
  • Fact checker for 1619: historian opinions were ignored on incorrect historical facts.
  • This theory was not published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but rather in media with prominent publicity and influence.
  • In 1619, slavery was not what we later know it as.
    • Slaves could own properties
    • Slaves have holidays and only work 5 and half days every week
    • Slave owners often go to court to settle problems
    • White and black Americans had often married each other
    • Slaves could buy for their own freedom
    • Once enslaved people had owned slaves themselves too
• Main claim
  • In 1619, settlers arrived at North America and brough slaves with them.
  • The current historic understanding on the founding of the United States is wrong.
  • The 1619 project tries to change that.

Postmodernism

• How it pertains to intellectuals (reliance on fact and truth)
• On truth
  • Truth is provisional; there is no definitive truth.
  • There can be multiple interpretations. Some are more “privileged.” 
  • One interpretation can be used by those in power to oppress others.
  • Has Marxist edge – to liberate the oppressed.

Dehumanization

• The term emerged in the 20-21th century, in the civil rights movements.
• Slave owners had incentives to extract labor from slaves
• Using the term dehumanization is incorrect.
  • Slave owners tried to convert slaves to christians.
  • Slave owners understood that slaves were people, rather than property
  • We should recognize that the problem is about how people are understanding and recognizing status differences or hierarchy in people. It is even worse, that these slave owners knew perfectly well that slaves were people, but still had chose to treat them in brutal ways.

Problem

• New York Times is a really popular magazine, and its reader base will take its writings seriously.

After reading the selected chapters of Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind, I was fascinated with Saad’s ideas on the “idea pathogens”. In the chapters we read, I think the main idea is that there has been an emerging trend in the recent decades of academia shifting from truth-seeking to trying to not hurt feelings. I also had the same question when I first joined the class – why are so many intellectuals making claims that are not “truth-seeking.” I had understood intellectuals as those who actively seek truth. However, as we learned more throughout the course, I found out intellectuals could do this for multiple reasons. The most recent one was about political correctness. I felt that Saad isn’t arguing that political correctness is objectively bad, but rather that it is not fit to appear in academia, since he feels that academia should be about trying to find and present truth about the world as accurately as possible. I also agree with his view that if we are intellectually discussing on some topic, the goal should be to learn about “the truth” on the topic, rather than on the people whose feelings might be hurt from learning about the truth.

So then I thought of a question: “how would someone know if something is really true?” I asked Saad this question in class, since he wrote that he is in “constant pursuit of the truth.” How do you really know if something is “true,” taking into account that science is always advancing, and old theories get replaced by new theories all the time. Saad’s response was that:

• Everything in science is provisionally true. So we probably can’t find the objective, definitive truth. So we should also be aware of this – that what we consider now as true might be found as not true later on.
• Thus, we should also be humble about knowledge. We should understand that there are always things that we don’t quite know about.
• On scientific claims or theories, we should apply the Karl popper falsification principle. The falsification principle basically states that: if a theory cannot be falsified, then it is not a scientific theory, since the “theory” would always hold “true,” regardless of the conditions. The example Gad Saad gave on this was about a graduate student doing a research project on sexism. And the argument was that, if they found evidence of rapes, then clearly it is sexism; if there was no rape, the point is that those men hated women so much that they won’t even rape them.
• If something is true, we can find multiple directions / perspectives to prove this. For example, Saad said that there is sex difference in toy preference for babies. He claimed this because he believed that there can be multiple ways to show this
  • First, there are studies on infants, before they were socialized, that found the preference.
  • If we look at other mammals such as monkeys or chimpanzees, we also noticed the same phenomenon, that again there are sex differences in toy preference.
  • And if we look at some hunter gatherer societies that are distant from our civilization, we also notice this in their tribes.
• So, if something is true, it will be true universally, in different conditions and no matter the dependent variables. And since they are universally true, we are able to find examples from different areas to prove it.

Here are some of my other questions:

• Why are apolitical people (intellectuals) and institutions (universities) now so political?
• Why do universities with the word “truth” in their mottos have forbidden knowledge?
• Why are we in this position now?

In Hollander’s Intellectuals, the chapter begins with countless numbers of praises towards Stalin. Yet, given our current understanding of him and the Soviet Union under his rule, Stalin was a person “foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy” and had an insatiable thirst for power. The praises all come from intellectuals, both western and within the Soviet Union, during Stalin’s time. 

Hollander claims that the two general reasoning behind western intellectuals’ worshiping of Stalin and other dictators are: 

1. Western intellectuals tend to have a “profound ignorance of the personalities, policies, and intentions” of them (p.120).
2. Western intellectuals had both the tendency and capacity to project qualities that they themselves value to others that they “were disposed to admire” (p.120).

While Hollander claims that these intellectuals admired cruel dictators like Stalin because of their ignorance of the dictator’s actual personality, I feel that there could be another huge reason behind this, giving the intellectuals the benefit of the doubt on their intellectual abilities. A possible explanation is that the dictators were able to control the flow of information out of the country. In an age without the internet, the only way that these western intellectuals could know about the reality under the ruling of the dictator was through other people’s reports or visiting the dictator’s nation. In both scenarios, they could be presented with false information, but they would have no way of verifying this information. Even when one visited the USSR, he or she would not ever see the whole reality. From my understanding, this really shows how powerful it is to have control over the media. Even in the modern day, with fact checks, we see so many people believing “fake news.” But, ultimately, philosophically speaking, how does one really know if what he knows is true? This again gets to an idea that came up during my conversation with Prof. Riley – under the Marxist view, the concept of truth is seen as a tool that the ruling class use to suppress and exploit the proletariats. Then, maybe psychologically, since one can never be sure of the truth, or a truth, one is inclined to believe in what one wishes to be the truth. This reasoning is present in Hollander’s chapter, and also we can see this is today’s social media – echo chambers, as some call them.

As for Duranty, I feel that he is quite hypocritical: he seemed to really “believed in the cause,” but he personally lived in Russia as a privileged individual. This is quite ironic to see that so many – the vast majority of people – are still being ripped off by the ruling class, under the name “socialism”; the goal to fully achieve socialism was to free every man so that we can all live under better conditions, yet in these actual implementations of socialism in USSR, femine and aristocracy showed that the Soviet socialism is no better than capitalism.

In reflection to the intellectuals praises of Stalin, I feel it is probably very hard to really know what really prompted these intellectuals to, whether intentionally or not, ignore the reality that they may or may not have seen. In Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, one conclusion is that people behave quite differently while in crowds. The moment one defines them as part of a popular group, they could act very differently than when they are alone. I suspect that this is also part of human nature: a revolutionary feature that might benefit the survival of humans as a species by enabling us to have this special “group” mindset. And, thus, when people are really in situations similar to that of the USSR under Stalin, they might be doing things they don’t expect themselves to do.

Furthermore, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may also be influenced by their own political beliefs and ideologies. Many of these intellectuals were likely sympathetic to the Marxist ideology, and thus saw Stalin as a leader who was implementing their ideals on a national level. This may have led them to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view Stalin as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause.

Additionally, it is worth considering the role of propaganda and manipulation in shaping the perceptions of western intellectuals towards Stalin. Stalin’s regime was highly skilled at using propaganda and censorship to control the flow of information within the country and to the outside world. This allowed the regime to present a highly sanitized and idealized version of life in the Soviet Union, and to suppress any information that did not align with this narrative. As a result, western intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union or relied on reports from the regime were likely to be presented with a distorted view of reality.

In conclusion, the admiration of Stalin by western intellectuals may be driven by a combination of factors, including ignorance of his true nature, idealization of communist ideology, and the effects of propaganda and manipulation. These factors may have led these intellectuals to overlook or dismiss reports of human rights abuses and other atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime, and to view him as a hero and leader of the Marxist cause. But among these factors, the most important one might be that these intellectuals themselves are willing to believe that Communism will succeed.

In Paul Hollander’s themes, he argues that there are several reasons why many western intellectuals appear to have some sort of double standards, where they are very critical of their own society yet they embrace communist societies while being tolerant of the flaws in communist societies.

The first reason is that these western intellectuals are being alienated from their own society.

Imagining how good the “other” society is with the goal of criticizing the flaws of their own society. Even when these intellectuals are aware of the flaws of the “other” society – like Jean Paul Sartre, who defended the USSR’s Gulag. Sartre selectively ignored it as a flaw, intentionally lied to the public, and defended the USSR so that it can be seen as the model society. Then, he could compare and contrast his own society to this model society, focusing all on the flaws of his society and the good of the model society, so that he has a ground to criticize his own society and potentially gain more societal influence.

There was little access to information on the actual life in these “police states.” Unlike the world we live in today – where pictures and videos can be sent even from Iran after their government had shut down the internet, it was a lot easier to control what information that people can see, if a government wished to control that.

Another reason for the double standards of western intellectuals is that they are often idealistic and romanticize the idea of communist societies. They may see communism as a way to create a more egalitarian and just society, and thus are willing to overlook its flaws and human rights abuses. This idealization of communism is often based on a lack of understanding of the realities of life in communist societies, and a willingness to believe in the propaganda put forth by those regimes.

Additionally, western intellectuals may also be motivated by a desire to be seen as progressive and enlightened. By expressing support for communist regimes, they may be able to position themselves as being on the cutting edge of political thought and more enlightened than their peers who criticize those regimes. This can give them a sense of superiority and self-righteousness, and can also help them gain influence and respect within intellectual circles.

Overall, the double standards of western intellectuals towards communist regimes are driven by a combination of alienation from their own society, idealization of communism, and a desire for personal and societal influence. These factors can lead them to overlook the flaws and human rights abuses of those regimes, and to express support for them despite their shortcomings.