Can we confront cancel culture by finding common ground between moderate leftists and ‘wokists’?
- Written by Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University
A.C. Grayling’s new book Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars sees the renowned philosopher wading into the ethical minefields of “woke” activism, cancellation, and conservative backlash.
Filled with thoughtful analysis, deep reflection, and fascinating historical detail, Discriminations argues the differences between leftist moderates and “woke activists” centrally concern means rather than ends.
Review: Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars (Oneworld Publications)
The book’s core contribution lies in Grayling’s searching examination of “othering”. This allows him to explain the core ethical concern about racism and sexism while simultaneously providing a principled basis to resist the more intolerant strategies that might be used in the struggle against such evils.
Defining ‘woke’
“Woke” and “wokist” now have pejorative implications and are terms used mainly by critics of progressive views. Grayling defines “wokism” in terms of the passionate advocacy of things like:
• Critical Race Theory in history classes
• Campaigning for same-sex marriage
• Educating about diversity in sexuality
• Supporting medical gender transition
• Advocating changes in language use, such as with non-gendered pronouns
• Encouraging Me Too avowals.
A significant number of identity politics activists, he adds, “promote no-platforming and cancellation as weapons in the struggle”.
This last point is critical in the way Grayling pictures the differences between moderate leftists like himself and “woke activists”. After all, the bulleted list above – apart perhaps from the reference to Critical Race Theory – includes many concerns broadly shared across the political left.
It turns out that political and ideological intolerance – Grayling recounts religious massacres and China’s Cultural Revolution – has a history every bit as awful as racially motivated massacres like the Holocaust. As he sombrely concludes: “tragedy attends entrenched positions that make mutual comprehension impossible”.
Grayling stresses it is right to feel anger at the world’s injustices. But a wariness of being drawn into othering should incline us towards what he terms “Aristotle’s Principle”: to be “angry with the right person, in the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose”.
Rights versus interests
Grayling adopts a human-rights-based approach as his moral compass, seeing it as a system that can transcend different cultures and parochial outlooks. He endorses the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – importantly including the right to free speech.
Cancelling can impinge on people’s free speech rights. As well as being wrong in itself, Grayling emphasises it’s also a strategic mistake. Activism itself requires free speech and it is unwise to “gift the high moral ground on free speech” to one’s political opponents. (That said, the political right in the United States is currently showing itself to be no friend of free speech either.)
Grayling distinguishes rights and interests. He argues, “no exercise of any right can deny the fundamental rights of others.” Too often, he insists, figures on both sides of politics interpret their opponents as violating their rights when the opponents are just impacting on their interests.
Grayling is surely correct that all sides of politics could benefit from seriously thinking through the differences between rights and interests. Setting back someone’s interests is not the same as violating their rights. Interests are inevitably in conflict and always require negotiation and compromise.
Still, there remains something of an elephant in the room. What if an opponent’s words or actions don’t violate anyone’s rights, but nevertheless plausibly contribute to a world where such violations are more likely?
Arguably, the problem of political intolerance isn’t driven by a conflation of rights with interests, but instead the ease with which any attack on a group’s interests can be represented as an indirect attack on their rights.
Does Grayling get ‘woke’ right?
It is a hard task to define an amorphous, contested and evolving concept like “wokism”. Grayling’s definition seems to map reasonably onto the original idea of being “woke to” (that is, newly aware of) structural racism and other inequities.
John McWhorter.
Columbia University
But as Grayling himself observes, “woke” is now more commonly used as a pejorative term. The linguist John McWhorter argues the term has evolved from describing those with a leftist political awareness to referring to “those who believe anyone who lacks that enlightenment should be punished, shunned or ridiculed.”
This is very different from Grayling’s understanding of the term. Most of the attributes Grayling ascribes to “the woke” are standard leftist positions. Worryingly, this sometimes seems to prevent him from engaging seriously with what many of the “woke” actually say and believe.
For example, Grayling reflects on those who say that wokist social justice has been strongly influenced by postmodernism. Postmodernism includes the denial of things like “objective truth” and “factual knowledge” on the basis that these are constructs of power and discourse.
But Grayling finds this confusing. After all, postmodernism seems to undercut the objective values of equality and social justice. He concludes:
What this suggests is that those who begin with the postmodern analysis of objectivity and knowledge are not actually saying that there are no such things, but that how they have been constituted in the past should be replaced by new and better conceptions of them.
This is simply not what the postmodernists are saying. The worry here is that Grayling takes it upon himself to stipulate what another school of thought is “actually” saying, rather than listening carefully to their ideas and arguments, and being open to the possibility that these may differ profoundly from his own.
Given the book aims to persuade the woke activists he thinks are going too far in cancelling others, the possibility Grayling is misreading their actual position is a concerning one.
Throughout, he appeals to the importance of democracy, free speech, human rights, the rule of law and due process, and the Enlightenment. He argues from what he sees as empirical evidence and “common knowledge”. But all these notions are wide open for criticism (from the woke perspective) that they are inventions of racist, patriarchal, and colonialist systems of oppression.
As such, Grayling’s arguments may fall flat for the very group he is trying to persuade because he does not take their beliefs seriously enough to engage directly and critically with them.
So who is right? Is Grayling correct that woke activists are just like him, except they have been led by their shared passions for social justice to indulge in often counter-productive and mistaken strategies of cancellation? Or is Yascha Mounk correct? Is wokism a profound departure from traditional leftist social justice goals?
Perhaps time will tell.
Authors: Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University
