In defence of wokeness

We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of it. In fact, the sharpest pens of the right seem to stab at more or less nothing else these days. Stab, stab, stab, they go. Many incisions are made and much ink and sawdust is spilled. So, being a believer in giving peace a chance, I’d like to sit for a moment on the bar stool still pleasantly warm from my colleague Rod’s momentarily departed bottom to offer a word or two in wokeness’s defence. I worry, you see, that it might be a bit of an Aunt Sally.

Thing is, ‘woke’ is a term that you now only ever see used as a sneer. It performs precisely the role that ‘politically correct’ and ‘loony left’ did in the late 1980s and early 1990s — reducing a whole range of positions to the punchline for a rather threadbare joke. Remember when stand-up comics and tabloid columnists saw ‘one-legged black lesbian single mothers’ as a symbol of the hilarious lunacy of ‘political correctness gone mad’ (never mind that such people existed, and I daresay had a pretty tough time of it, and weren’t intrinsically any funnier than the two-legged variety)? We’re near as dammit back there.

One of my late grandfather’s wise sayings was: ‘Nobody ever destroyed a man by sneering.’ The culture wars are now being conducted almost entirely through sneering — and as long as they are, they will remain unwinnable. If you want to crush the left — and, goodness me, why shouldn’t you? — ‘woke’ won’t do it, because it’s not an argument so much as a retreat to the comfort zone — a sort of ideological thumb-sucking. Using ‘woke’ as a catch-all term of derogation may elicit sniggers from your own side, but it betrays a dismal incuriosity about what it is that you’re actually opposing.