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The great American jurist Potter Stewart, during his service on the United States Supreme Court, was famous for being the “swing vote” in critical cases relating to free speech, equality, abortion, and privacy. He was also famous for his pragmatic approach to the law, this being best summed up in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v Ohio, in which the State of Ohio sought to ban a particular film, the 1958 French drama “Les Amants”, on the grounds that it was obscene and pornographic.
In a now famous concurrence with the decision not to permit Ohio to ban Les Amants, Stewart wrote that the film should not be banned because, in his opinion, the first amendment to the US constitution protected all free speech other than “hardcore pornography”, which he concluded was not at issue in the case. He then went on to write about what “hardcore pornography” might be, concluding: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
“I know it when I see it” thus became one of the most famous phrases in all of American law – a simple, seven-word articulation of the fact that some things which defy a short and easily understood definition are nevertheless instantly recognisable to us when we spot them.
I mention this because of a challenge set out at the weekend by Irish Times assistant editor Joe Humphreys in a piece for that newspaper, in which he challenged Senator Sharon Keogan and Fianna Fail TD Willie O’Dea to define a word they had both used last week: Woke. We should pause here to note that if you’d had to pick, at the start of the year, which of our legislators might ultimately start a debate about what “wokeness” is, basically nobody would have predicted Willie O’Dea. We live in strange times indeed.
In fairness to Humphreys, his challenge is not an unreasonable or an unfair one. When we share a democracy, the foundational purpose of which is to discuss ideas collectively and arrive at decisions on what to do as a collective of individuals, it is really important that all of us know, in so far as practicable, what those ideas mean and what their advocates are talking about. There is a particular duty on elected representatives to make themselves clear and understandable. In the internet age, it’s all-too tempting to fall into the language of a small tribe and leave everybody else looking on in bafflement, wondering what on earth you are talking about. This is a challenge the hard left have never managed to meet, waffling on for decades now about “false consciousness” and “the proletariat” while most ordinary people tune them out as incoherent babblers.
The first thing to say about “woke” in answer to Humphreys is that it is not an idea, but a set of ideas, in the same way that neither “conservatism” or “socialism” are just one idea, but constitute a suite of beliefs. It is further true that one can be broadly conservative, or broadly socialist, without subscribing to every single idea within the collective worldview that those words describe. This is also true of “woke”: It refers to a broad attitude to the world, rather than a fixed set of ten unchangeable beliefs that every “woke” person must subscribe to. We have no difficulty accepting “liberalism” or “conservatism” as descriptions of attitudes rather than universal beliefs, and so we should have no difficulty doing the same for “woke”.
But what are those “woke” attitudes? My own attempt at a starting point would be “socialism, but for culture and tradition rather than the economy”.
Socialism might be best understood as the belief that society is economically structured to oppress the workers, that the economy is rigged to benefit the best off and prevents the poorest people from getting ahead. The posited socialist solution is a simple one: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, so we should take from the rich and give to the poor.
Wokeness, by contrast, extends that idea away from the economy and into culture and tradition: Society is socially constructed in a way that oppresses women, minorities, and basically everyone other than white men, so, it argues, we should redress that balance in our laws. If free speech permits somebody to say a negative thing about an oppressed group, then free speech should be restricted. If society is structured in a way that oppresses women, then our laws should ensure that women are given an advantage over men to redress that, and so on.
What makes wokeness truly revolutionary though is that it marks the abandonment of an idea that the left has held dear since the French revolution: Equality.
When the French disgracefully, and without justice, chopped the head off their King, they did so in the name of the idea that all should be treated equally. This animating spirit is ultimately what gave us public health services, social welfare, the vote, free education, and much else: The basic idea was that the rights and freedoms and way of life of the aristocracy should be extended to everybody else.
Wokeness takes that a step further, and explicitly abandons equality as a goal: The idea in essence is that the “aristocracy” should be replaced en masse by those they formerly oppressed, and that their roles should be reversed: Thus men, rather than being equal to women, should be actively disadvantaged in elections, as they explicitly are under Ireland’s gender quota laws. Or minorities, rather than being oppressed, should be given special protected status in our hate laws, which, if passed, will make it more of a crime to assault a dark-skinned person out of alleged “hate” than it would be to assault a white-skinned person in the exact same manner out of jealousy. This echoes ancient laws that made it much more of a crime for a peasant to strike an aristocrat than for a peasant to strike another peasant.
But it’s more than that: Because wokeness is an attitude and a suite of beliefs, rather than a ten-point plan, Potter Stewart’s maxim is relevant: We know it when we see it.
This is because wokeness has one thing in common with the rest of the history of left-wing ideological thought: The idea that things we do not like can be legislated away.
Every communist society in history has attempted the same thing: To create a society of genuinely equal people, where all live in harmony with a perfect allocation of resources. Everybody has a home; everybody has access to healthcare; everybody has access to the same recreational activities; and so on. Every communist society in history has failed ultimately for the same reason: People are not born equal, and as such to enforce equality you must do it not by raising the weakest to the level of the strongest, but by tearing down the over-achievers to ensure that their skills do not make them unequal. Communism does not survive contact with human nature: The over-achievers either flee, creating a brain drain, or they form an elite within the regime, living like kings while the peasants work collective farms, and corruption kills the utopian idea.
The same is ultimately true of wokeness: You recognise it in the idea that in order to perfect society, we must restrict traditional freedoms. To make women equal, we must deprive men of some of their rights. To make minorities feel safe, we must restrict the rights of the majority. To make us all kind and compassionate, we must oppress the meanies. The ultimate problem is the same: it does not survive contact with human nature, which is why the woke are so often at their angriest about human nature: Male sexual desire, for example, is a particular bugbear. Traditional gender roles, which have evolved in tune with human nature, are another.
This, ultimately, is why Potter Stewart was right: We do know it, when we see it, because wokeness is ultimately an attitude. It is reflected in the perpetual disappointment that our leaders appear to feel for the people they govern: How we eat too much; drink too much booze; hold racist attitudes; fornicate without filling out consent forms; do not care about the temperature of the planet in 2099; cannot be trusted to recycle; and so on, and so on, and so, endlessly, on.
If you want a simple example, think of the bright idea that former FG Senator Catherine Noone postulated way back in 2014: That ice-cream vans, in the summer, should be banned from playing jaunty music to attract children. Children are attracted to jaunty music, ice cream makes children fat, ergo our betters should regulate the music played from ice cream vans in the common good, to make us all better, less fat people. That’s wokeness, to a tee.
It is an attitude of hostility to human nature, and argues in favour of the idea that we can be perfected. And in Ireland, it is as close as we come to the official religion of the state.
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