A world of our own making

Two very brief excerpts from Radio 4 last week. First, my wife turned on her radio in time to hear an actor in the afternoon play utter the words: ‘But Bob, you’ve been helping young disadvantaged black kids all your life!’ At which point, she turned off. Two days later I switched on my car radio and the display announced a ‘radical updating of Oliver Twist’ and I had just enough time to hear an actor say something like: ‘Quick, come quick! Babatunde has been shot in de leg by de gangs!’ before I too turned off. They are nothing if not psychotically obsessive at Radio 4, I think. It is worth tuning in for three seconds every few hours at random just to see what gratuitous wokery they are spraying in our direction – before switching over to something else, anything else.

People wonder where wokery has come from and those on the alt-right are often inclined to put it down to some ectoplasmic thing called ‘Cultural Marxism’. I have my grave doubts. Marx was both empirical and famously collectivist, while progressive politics is individualistic and post-rational. In the late autumn of this year I was asked by the New Culture Forum to deliver the Smith Lecture in front of a few hundred people in London and took as my topic the origins of this asinine creed, wokery. (I don’t know who Smith is, by the way. It wasn’t Adam, nor Jacqui, nor W.H. Perhaps it was named in honour of George Smith, a combative midfielder who played for Middlesbrough at the turn of the 1970s and a little later for Birmingham City.)

My conclusion was not a particularly happy or useful one. What we call wokery does not have a proper ideological base because it is incoherent and often contradictory: you would need to be on very good-quality acid to unite its various strands into a semblance of semantic order – and it still wouldn’t make sense.