Wokeness Defined

 

The essence of CRT/CT, postmodernism, “wokeness,” can be expressed in one simple statement: “Reality is a function of belief.” I think that is Kierkegaard’s formulation. Or here is William Blake’s: “A firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”

There, I defined it; and the left claims nobody can. 

So, say the woke, there is no truth; there is only “your truth.” There are no rules, no right and wrong; only a need to impose your own preferred reality on others. As in, demanding they use your pronouns.

Men declaring themselves women is the currently fashionable test case. If it looks relatively harmless, just wait for what comes next.

I have been hearing versions of this dogma—dogma is the word—since undergraduate days back in the 1970s. It took decades for me to fully shake this off, if I even have. One must not, in any circumstances, be “judgemental.” One must not get “hung up” on “meaning,” as one prize postgrad essay in religion asserted. Marcuse was hot back then: “Beware: even the ears have walls,” as one graffito said during the Paris uprisings. This idea has been drilled into our young people now for perhaps 3.5 generations.

The idea is attractive to the young. Sensitive or intelligent young people must realize that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy”—that philosophy being the dominant materialism. Postmodernism seems to offer the response, segueing nicely from LSD: we are not limited to the material, but can live entirely in our imaginations.

Heck, it even seems to be endorsed by the Christian tradition: Blake and Kierkegaard were, or considered themselves, Christians. Jesus said  “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20). Martin Luther emphasized faith as both necessary and sufficient for salvation: the whole ball game.

But there is something critical missing in the postmodern formulation: God. The faith spoken of by Jesus, or Blake, or Kierkegaard, is not faith in self or in the will. That’s Hitler.  It is faith in God.

Consider the traditional solipsist conundrum: “If a tree falls I the forest, and no one is there to hear, did it make a sound?”

And the necessary answer is, it makes a sound because God knows. God is the touchstone of all existence, the ground of being. Without faith in God, as Descartes, for one, explained. one has no warrant that anything else is real. It is then possible, as Chesterton pointed out, to randomly believe in anything.  Madness is inevitable, the only alternative to such faith. 

Accordingly, if God says a mountain will move, it must move. If he says it will move at your command, it will move at your command. Because God. Nothing else is or is anything here or there except because God.  But this magic works if and only if you are following God’s will, not your own.

And, of course, it is generally God’s will that a mountain be where he put it.

In denying God, we are collectively pulling the plug on everything. It is mass madness, and it is the madness of the proverbial lemmings.