‘Progressive’ or ‘woke’ politics is undoubtedly religious. But not in a good way. In championing transgender, ethnic minority or postcolonial ‘victims’, it fully embraces the zeal of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus to raise up the downtrodden. And it shares their righteous ire against those who do the treading down. But there’s a problem. Prophetic zeal unrestrained by other elements produces a distorted Christianity. Wokery is a Christian heresy.
In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless
Since I was dragged into the culture wars in 2017, because I didn’t think that colonialism was simply wicked, I’ve spent over eight years dealing with ‘woke’ critics, many of them with the title ‘Professor’ or ‘Reverend’ in front of their name, or ‘Church Commissioner’ behind it. My consistent experience has been that they don’t behave like creatures and sinners. They betray no sign of feeling the need to learn or be corrected. They conduct themselves as if they have absolute possession of the truth and the only reason some might disagree is that they’re morally wicked (that is, racist). So, they don’t listen or reflect thoughtfully on what dissenters have to say. Instead, they respond with unscrupulous aggression – smearing critics’ reputations, misreporting their words, twisting them into strawmen the easier to blow down and seeking to intimidate them into silence. As Priyamvada Gopal, the Cambridge professor who first brought the culture wars to my doorstep, tweeted to her comrades after reading about my ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, ‘OMG. This is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN’. In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless. (Readers looking for further substantiation of my claims here can find chapter and verse in The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars.)
A leading feature of decolonising ‘wokery’ is its exaggeration of the sins of western civilisation – the civilisation that Christianity has done most to shape. One common expression of this is the wholesale damnation of the British Empire. Now, we can argue about whether the Empire was, all things considered, more a force for evil than good. But no one holding themselves accountable to the facts of history can deny that it chalked up some major humanitarian and liberal achievements. Exhibit A: the Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the hitherto universal practice of slavery and then led the world in suppressing it, from Brazil to New Zealand, for over a century.
Exhibit B: from June 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire was the only military opposition to the genocidally racist regime in Nazi Berlin, with the sole exception of Greece. But these achievements the ‘woke’ prophets adamantly refuse to acknowledge, lest it muddy the simple waters of their absolute condemnation.
Why? Why the stubborn, truth-defying exaggeration? One plausible explanation is this. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint stands out as one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner she really is. Like all virtue, however, this can be corrupted into vice. As Jesus pointed out, humility can be infected by pride. So, don’t make a public display of your piety. Don’t virtue-signal. For genuine humility can degenerate into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou. In The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, the Jesuit-educated Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes of contemporary, post-imperial Europe (and by extension, the non-US West): ‘This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history… Europe is still messianic in a minor key.’
In this self-regarding display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage: ‘by erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others… In western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian and Arab are brought in as extras.’
This psychological speculation by a right-of-centre French philosopher is given empirical substantiation by the left-of-centre Australian anthropologist, Peter Sutton, in his book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus.
After spending several decades among the aboriginal Wik peoples of northern Queensland, Sutton became convinced that their social dysfunction was caused less by historic colonialism than by contemporary factors. Yet he found that ‘woke’ opinion was in thrall to an ideological ‘politics of compassion’ that resisted the implications of expert or statistical evidence and obstructed the crafting of realistic remedies: ‘Simplistic causal accounts continue to grow like healthy weeds’. For example: ‘The kids don’t go to school because the teachers are racists.’ ‘What enables the purveyors of such pap, and those who swallow it,’ he asks, ‘to so suspend their normal critical faculties?’ The answer he gives to his own question about the springs of such ‘uncaring kindness’ is career-interests: ‘Victimhood becomes, for many, the family business, a business of status as well as of economics.’
If ‘woke’ prophets really cared to liberate the oppressed, they’d be eager to understand the causes of their plight correctly, the better to craft effective remedies. So, when presented with evidence that their wonted diagnosis – say, historic slavery and systemic racism – doesn’t stand up rationally or empirically they’d react with keen, albeit sceptical, curiosity. But, as Sutton observed, that’s not how they behave. Instead, they move to shut contradiction down. Wokery isn’t really about raising up the downtrodden. It’s about puffing up the prophet.
The Rev. Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and author of ‘The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars’ (Polity).
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