Hesitation and caution in fighting back

I have been fighting and arguing against this ideological trend for a decade. And to this great culmination in that battle I say, no! Not like this. We need warriors. No doubt. There is hope. No doubt. But we need more than this belligerent, ascendant aggression.

There is so much more to be reckoned with. It is insufficient to simply identify the enemy and develop the tools to defeat them. A broader perspective must be taken, or we risk losing the fight at the moment the tide turns.

If I had Douglas Murray and Sir Roger Scruton here (RIP), I feel like we could steer this back to where it needs to go. You cannot win great wars of culture merely on what you know to be false or what you despise. It is so much easier to criticize than to create. That is half the problem with wokeism. It is a culture of blame and exclusion and criticism and deconstruction and division.
Criticism is insufficient. Shutting down the enemy, cutting out the infection, burning it out of its strongholds; those are tactics, but they are the tactics of the people you’re resisting. You are seizing upon their mistakes, not correcting them.

No, Dave, you are wrong. You do not know that they’re lying. They do not know that they’re lying. Maybe some tiny, tiny fraction do. But no, these people are captives, as much as they are enemy soldiers. We may have to face and resist them, but if you cannot understand why they are captive and cannot see any possibility of extracting them from that captivity, then you do not understand the field of battle sufficiently to win the war. Quite likely, you will only create the next enemy. Or become it.

I have been in bad churches. I have fought with them. And I also recognized long ago that the woke ideology was itself fundamentally a religious movement. The problem is that people like Peter have still not grasped the essential fact that modernism created postmodernism, or at least created the conditions for it and the necessity of something like it to arise. His idea is to just cut God out of humanity. As if religion can simply be expunged from the human heart.

Modernism tried that, and it left a gaping wound that something had to fill. And I do mean “had to”. Mankind is not a functional conceptual entity without religion. If you squashed every religion in the world, people would find some tiny fragment of what was left them to make an idol out of. And that’s exactly what did happen.

The pain and confusion that these people are feeling, the desperation that drives them to seek an identity in whatever fragment that can be found to unite them, is quite justified. What else do people have left but race or sex or some mean identity to cling to? All the wealth in the world can’t buy meaning and purpose and the feeling of being known and valued. They hope to find it here. And they’re just as ignorant and naive in their hopes as the modernists.

The modernists still dream atheistic dreams that the postmodernists will see how things are coming apart and repent. That they will come back with their hats in their hands and apologize for ever doubting the greatness and brilliance of the modernists who first divested them of everything that spiritually and psychologically and philosophically gave their life meaning, and then berated and demolished them for following that bereavement to its logical consequences, picking up the only loyalties and identities they had left.

You can’t ignore the events in the first half of the twentieth century that led to the decline and rejection of and insurrection against modernism. Until you have grasped why people were vulnerable to falling into the cult of wokeism, you’re not qualified to save them from it.

Maybe ten years ago I would have spoken the same way as Peter. But I’ve been married and had children, and I’ve come a long way since my old combative days in the philosophy department, where the battle takes place principally in the realm of ideas. Does postmodernism cheat and mislead by placing lived experience ahead of reasoning? Surely it does. But on a psychological level there is a cry trying to reach the ears of the theoreticians that something about their brilliant talk fails to capture or address the actual reality of human needs and experience. These people didn’t fall into this ideology simply because they were stupid and corrupt, but because they were hungry and deprived and searching, because they had some deep need that required somewhere to go.

I’ve also lived with resentment against bad churches. I’ve found myself pushed out and had a long journey of resentment, and I’ve acquired a great wariness of anything resembling my previous experiences. But I’ve also had an ongoing window into the lives of those people and what they were seeking, what they were doing, and how things went wrong, and what enslaved goodness was underlying their efforts that gave it the power it had. And I’ve come to realize this. You don’t save people from bad churches by simply getting them out, or by destroying the bad church. You save a bad church by turning it into a good one.

And if you don’t have a vision for how that could be done or what that would mean, then you can’t help people in the long run. They’ll only fall into a different trap. Maybe a worse one. One that they won’t recognize because they will identify the pathology with the faith itself and not what people did with it, and won’t realize that such a corruption could arise out of any structure of meaning and identity.

I’ve seen people fall right out of religious faith and straight into wokeism. And wokeism itself is a child of atheism far more than it is a child of theism (or at least). In a way it’s a return to the pagan state of nature. Of the fracturing of universal unity and truth and value before God into the natural identities and animosities of race and sex and whatever local deities you worship, where life is a struggle to see whose gods will prevail.

Is wokeism dangerous and toxic? Is it likely to cost us everything we’ve built? Certainly. But this is the world we created. These are conditions the modern world created. People couldn’t live as men without chests. So they reached into their dark recesses and found their passion and their particularity, and went all in on it to save themselves. They became all heart and subjugated their minds. The battle between modernism and postmodernism is a familial battle, not a war among strangers. Postmodernism was born in the house of confident scientific atheism and modernism. It is a judgment against it for thinking it could make men in this way and expect them to live without blood in their veins. So we got a religion of blood.

In a way, I believe that postmodernism contains the key to the redemption and renewal and resurrection of modernism. And modernism contains the key to that renewal for postmodernism. I think there is hope in both, if each could only learn the lessons the other is trying to teach them. The father figure of modernism was blind and dying. The rebellious son has tried to kill and bury him. And now the father strikes back. But it’s only when the two finally reunite in peace and reconciliation that the young will grow wise and the old will be regenerated.

What form that will, or could, or should, take, I simply don’t know. But it’s creeping toward us. If we can steer round the Charybdis and Sylla of chaotic revolution and tyrannical oppression. What I hear from these men doesn’t give me much hope that the lessons that really needed to be learned have been learned. It’s easy to figure out what is wrong about someone else and what they think. It’s much harder to figure out what’s wrong about yourself, or how you might go wrong criticizing or fixing them, still less what kind of meeting between you could yield a better version of both of you.

Dave, your mind has changed, but has your heart? Or do you find yourself feeling and saying the same things about the lefties that you used to sling against the right? The wisdom you should gain from traveling across such ideological divides isn’t as simple as realizing that you had got wrong which guys were right and which were wrong, and now you’ve got it sorted. You gain, I hope, the ability to see how either sort could go wrong, and how to find what was seeking the right in both. You gain understanding of the kind of people who take either position for granted, and seek the wisdom to guide both toward a higher knowledge.

I have greatly enjoyed Peter’s work. He is a snorting stallion. His value as an ally is inestimable. He’s a Douglas MacArthur. Great for winning battles. But this is a battle being fought on our own soil, against our own brothers and sisters. We cannot merely conquer or defeat them. We need to create a space for them, something for them to love and inhabit, something to create unity between us and give their lives meaning. Will learning that they’re simply wrong about the prospects of wokeism, that the promises of meaning and justice and purpose and identity and value and moral absolution it gives cannot be fulfilled, take away their pain and need and desire and confusion?

I think all this is something Douglas is actually aware of. I think he’s optimistic that L, with the help of those who can sweep away the poison of wokeism, the clean waters will be free to flow again. That the deep fountains of human life and meaning will rise to the surface and wash away the detritus of the last century. And maybe he’s right. I hope so. But that has often not been the case, when powers are raised to defeat a danger, but the underlying cause has not been sufficiently understood or addressed.

You get peace for a time. Then you get new tyrants, new factions, new struggles. And maybe that what history is and always will be. A kind of wobble between extremes of order and chaos, head and heart, brain and blood. Each denying some essential part of our nature, and each in turn paying the price for that blindness. But maybe, with wisdom, we can at least keep the vascilation to a wobble, and avoid a new crash.