Waking up to Wokeness

Wokeism Meme:

Compared to Me, You’re a Moral Failure:

If You Disagree, You’re Part of the Problem

Did you know that Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and avatar of the Sexual Revolution, is also regarded as the founding father of Wokeness? Today’s hippest ideology?

It’s true. Countless academics and scholars regard Foucault as post-modernism’s most influential thinker. This is because his postmodernism gave birth to ‘critical theory’ which promoted the rejection of the individual, Western civilization and all objective reality. Instead, Foucault regarded the dynamic of life as comprised of identity groups locked in power struggles between the virtuous ‘oppressed’ and their demonic ‘oppressors’.

This, in turn, produced Critical Race Theory (CRT) which has become the foundation of the American Democrat Party’s ideology.

And like Critical Theory, postmodernism is a viciously destructive philosophy. Which may be why the recent news that Foucault molested little boys while teaching philosophy in Tunisia in the late 1960s is as unsurprising as his advocacy for legalizing paedophilia, his publicly expressed interest in sadomasochism and his death of AIDS at age 57 in 1984.

Yet, despite Foucault’s self-professed Marxist leanings, his academic colleague Guy Sorman, 77, told the UK Sunday Times last month that his private behaviour was actually typical of French elitism, noting that Foucault “believed there were two morals, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive.”

Today Foucault’s intellectual offspring are just as elitist as he was, but they now use their control of media to promote moral degeneracy equally to everyone. And with equally poisonous results, as the late philosopher Roger Scruton well understood.

In Scruton’s view, Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless “struggle” between oppressed and oppressing groups. This shift of emphasis has led to a new kind of scholarship, which bypasses entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions ideological in themselves. The result is that most establishment journalists steeped in this viewpoint now reject objective reality in favour of the current liberal narrative.

So it’s no accident that the nihilistic Foucault is now said to be the world’s most cited academic, personifying modern academia. It’s a world Scruton described as follows:

“When at last the veil is lifted, we perceive a wondrous landscape: a world of negations, a world in which, wherever we look for presence we find absence, a world not of people but of vacant idols, in the places where we seek for order, friendship and moral value, only the skeleton of power. There is no creation in this world, though it is full of cleverness a cleverness actively deployed in the cause of Nothing. It is a world of un-creation, without hope or faith or love, since no ‘text’ could possibly mean those transcendental things. It is a world in which negation has been endowed with the supreme instruments power and intellect making absence into the all-embracing presence. It is, in short, the world of the Devil.”

Yet its drumbeat grows ever louder, says Sorman. By the 1980s, the American “Foucauldians”, as the philosopher’s academic admirers are known, were steeped in his distinctly French malaise dating back to Voltaire and “enshrining Foucault as a kind of patron saint . . . whose authority they routinely invoked in order to legitimize in properly academic terms, their own brand of progressive politics.” And which they continue to use, like Foucault before them, to permit themselves whatever they want.

The Woke Agenda

So what does all this nastiness have to do with ‘wokeness’? And why its ubiquity which momentarily seems so remote here in my own bourgeois neighbourhood where we’re all masked but where the birds are busy and the tulips are blooming right on time?

Why am I’m seeing the word “Woke” everywhere I look? Including at my library where I’m invited to become ‘woke’ by signing up to a program where, at the end of a year of reading a list of recommended books on Wokeism – such as Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility – I will have completed the Woke Challenge 2021. Then I too will know exactly how to challenge a social norm; how to tell the side of the oppressed; how to provide information about a group that has been disenfranchised; how to challenge the status quo and how to shed light on an issue that many may not regard as being an issue.

And after a year of reorganizing my mental furniture by reading all about literary diversity; all about the voices of women, people of colour, First Nations, Inuit, Metis and LGBTQ+; all about mental health and diverse abilities; all about poverty and immigration; and all about social injustice and environmental justice, I will fully understand Wokeness … its style, its form of education, its call to action. I too will then be armed with knowledge to better protect my ‘rights’. I too will have learned about others so that I can treat people with the respect and dignity they deserve, no matter their religion, race or colour. Or mine.

Which, it is assumed, I have not been doing.

Grooming Generations

But I have also been around long enough to witness and identify the grooming of generations. And its methods. Which have lately included story hours wherein sequin-sparkling cross-dressers  tell stories to squealing five-year-old children in tranquil small community libraries. Libraries where local school boards are now battling over whether to raise rainbow flags of celebration of gays and their lifestyle. Or not.

Are these phenomena related? We all know the answer.

Comes the Revolution

Call me old-fashioned but all the above describes what always was and always will be the vanguard and recruiting forays of Revolution. Which are always violent, one way or another.

And regardless of what the Revolution purports to be in this particular moment in history, in the end, it’s invariably the latest phase in the perpetual and permanent Revolution which, for more than two centuries now, has been seeking to destroy Christendom and the civilization it produced. It’s the revolution which began with Voltaire’s Enlightenment and paused on the guillotine, and then continued through to the emergence of Marxism. Which, in turn, ignited Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which morphed into a series of genocides across the 20th century and continues to this day. And which, one day, may culminate in its international grand finale.  But that is to get ahead of ourselves.

For now, it’s important to recognize that at every stage of this global Revolution against God and His entire creation, this Game – though it regularly attempts to change its name – repeats itself like wallpaper. And it’s always the same:

Eliminate God from the life equation and substitute the intended void with the State. And, privately, with love of self, love of power and/or love of money. Which, when that fails to produce happiness, is when Man turns to perversion in all its forms to fill the void. And then, in a desperate bid to find peace of mind he demands public acceptance – and even celebration – of the same old death-dealing sins that have destroyed every society that indulged in them: Abortion, euthanasia, all manner of sexual sin, murder, greed, theft and so on …. all cited and prohibited in The Ten Commandments which human beings must obey in all eras and in all seasons for daily life to remain functional, creative and abundant as the Lord God designed it to be.

Teachers as Revolutionaries

And wokeness will be no different. Why? Because it is a vicious attack on reality designed to completely destroy human society as God intended it. By definition, it sets its anarchic face against the framework of God’s order. As demonstrated yet again recently when the State of Illinois released its Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Standards, defining the ‘ideal’ (read ‘radical’) teacher:

“The culturally responsive teacher and leader will… explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”

  • “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will… assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”
  • “Culturally responsive teachers and leaders understand that there are systems in our society that create and reinforce inequities, thereby creating oppressive conditions.”
  • “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will…be aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action to better empower diverse students and communities.”
  • The culturally responsive teacher and leader will… know and understand how a system of inequity creates rules regarding student punishment that negatively impacts students of color.”
  • “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will… hold high expectations in which all students can participate and lead as student advocates or activists.”

This means that only those who believe in relativism, Critical Race Theory and intersectionality are qualified to teach in the State of Illinois. These teachers must impose these tenets on their students. Teachers are considered successful when they turn students into leftist “social justice warriors.”

But can these same victimized students do math, read well and widely develop their own God-given talents and truly critical abilities? And do they know Right from Wrong? The ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of any functional society?

Note too the unthreatening nature of the words used to conceal their real intentions. And their endless repetition across radio, television, print and internet so as to hypnotize the listener into mindless familiarity and acceptance. All reinforced by the instantaneous ‘cancelling’ of anyone who dissents from these tenets of Wokeness?

Inventing Systemic Racism

In this way, the Leftist media in the West has been wildly successful in advancing the fallacy that America is “systemically racist” – and we’re now hearing this in Canada too – rooted in arguments that the white majority suffers from subconscious racism which contaminates the entire “system.” All this while proponents of Critical Race Theory and government-created “Equity” insist they have solutions for this “affliction” – including the conditioning of those who suffer “white guilt” and “white fragility” – and with the full support of President Joe Biden who has eagerly joined this crusade to eliminate subconscious racism!

Meanwhile, as white Americans are kept in the dark as to the details of this enlightening reprogramming, they are currently being told that the Bill of Rights is an impediment to these lofty new goals to eradicate systemic biases. The first step of which will be to eliminate subconscious racism by stifling conscious thoughts and reprogramming the minds of white majorities that the liberties of Free Speech and Due Process have long been tools of white oppression and, therefore, must be eradicated.

And while it’s axiomatic that governments cannot eliminate subconscious racism, history shows that governments can be very effective at fomenting the very racism they purport to oppose, as numerous historic and current examples demonstrate. How, for example, can such Marxist-Communist groups as Antifa and BLM eradicate the very racism they practise and encourage?

There is no answer to this conundrum, of course, because these are just some of the violent shock troops now being employed – along with campaigns to defund police – to bring the Covid-exhausted U.S. to its knees in true revolutionary style. This is also why – contrary to all denials – it now appears to those with eyes to see that the Biden administration does not want to unify the country but rather to atomize it completely by forcing its ideology on an unwilling country by unleashing division, paranoia, self-hatred, false guilt, fear, chaos and routine violence on their own countrymen. The revolutionary goal in this case is to break the America the Left so despises into so many confused and disoriented pieces that it will succumb to totalitarian dictatorship and never rise again.

Opposing Wokeness

All Catholics should oppose this. All of it. Including Foucault’s Critical Race Theory (CRT) which, like all Marxist movements, seeks revolution by framing the debate and setting the stage for revolutionary action based on templates of class struggle. Unlike the Catholic Church which has always sought to discourage the sinful practices and structures that destroy societies and ruin individual lives.

But deeper than that is the fundamental teaching of Catholicism that every human being is created with an immortal soul made in the image of God, and re-made in His likeness at Baptism, Whose Son died for the salvation of the souls of all Mankind on the cross at Calvary and wants each of us – from all parts of the world and throughout Salvation history – to spend eternity with Him in Heaven.

How opposite is that to CRT which views Western nations as boiling cauldrons of victimized groups thereby seeking, as with all Marxist activism, to encourage discontent and resentment? Ultimately, CRT is irreconcilable with traditional Christian teaching because it promotes a deceitful perspective of humanity in order to impose its atheistic views and create distrust and all manner of bad feeling while also demanding universal and unqualified submission, allowing no opposing opinion. It’s a theory as far removed from Truth and Reality as Heaven is from Hell.

Bottom line: Wokeness, Political Correctness, Cultural Marxism, Cancel Culture, Intersectionality and SJW-ism are all facets of the same thing. Revolution. Which is taking a giant wrecking ball to Christianity and the foundations of Western civilization which has already been deeply eroded by the destruction of the family, the destruction of national identity and social cohesion, by the denigration of anything normal and traditional, by glorifying anything degenerate and nihilistic, by importing in and/or inventing as many victim classes as possible for purposely agitating them against the majority and acquiring absolute power to crush any pockets of resistance.

Who would want that? Just asking.

Yet I too can now be indoctrinated with all the ‘palatable’ aspects of the above agenda at my local library! A library, I might add, that has been converted quite tastefully from its origins as a local church. And that distinguishes itself as ever so up-to-date with its newly painted Rainbow crosswalk welcoming me to the front door of this not so brave new world.

 

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Paula Adamick is founding editor of The Canada Post, the newspaper serving the Canadian expat community in the United Kingdom (about 200,000 of us) from 1997 to 2012. With a BA in English and Journalism and a UK Masters degree in International Journalism, Adamick has also served as arts correspondent for The Scotsman and as a frequent contributor to The Evening Standard, and The Daily Mail (all UK) as well as to Canadian publications such as Challenge and Catholic Insight.