Desire and Fate
The two most powerful elements of Woke are its project of moralizing everything (this is what make it so clearly post-Protestant), and its project of politicizing everything. About the latter, to use a favorite Woke expression, there are no safe spaces for the non-political for the simple reason such a category is held not to exist, or to be a mask for the politics of racial supremacy, patriarchy, and exploitation that Woke is trying to overthrow. What this is doing and will do to the pursuit of pleasure is one of the more interesting questions posed by Woke. ‘Check your privilege’ is no longer enough. At the cutting edge of gender militancy, it is increasingly common to find the idea of ‘check your preference,’ that is, to ask yourself whether not wanting to sleep with someone, as in the case of their for example, of a heterosexual man or a lesbian (classically understood, as it were), not wanting to have sex with a trans woman with a penis, is an act of transphobia?
What informs all this on the deepest level, I think, is the belief that not only is being a good person more important than anything else, but that personal goodness is fundamentally a political act. Unsurprisingly, this is now rampant in the liberal professions, and has now migrated into the STEM world, to the point where a white female physician some years ago agonized in the pages of the now fully Woke The Lancet that, “"If we white physicians are to heal others and ultimately the health care system, we must first heal ourselves." [https://read.qxmd.com/read/30811907/racist-like-me-a-call-to-self-reflection-and-action-for-white-physicians]
That this physician wants to virtue signal in this exhibitionistic way is her business (The Lancet’s decision to publish the piece is another matter). But what is new and harmful in all this is the metaphorization of the idea of healing in that it erases any useful distinction between being good at what one does and being a good person. To put it starkly, this doctor being by her own auto-diagnosis in need of being healed or healing herself of her racism is not remotely as important as treating one of her patients for leukemia. And yet if anything, she seems to think the reverse is the case. “If we white physicians are to heal others and ultimately the health care system,” she writes, “we must first heal ourselves.”
The problem is this gets things exactly backwards: not only is it possible but it is far more important for a physician to heal a child’s leukemia than her own racism. It is the difference between heal and ‘heal,’ but so complete has been the triumph of metaphor in this society that the distinction literally no longer informs adult judgment. Meanwhile it is apparently unbearable to the moral sensibilities of this age to accept the fact that it is perfectly possible for a racist person to make a scientific discovery that is of benefit to humanity. Instead, though, the contemporary tendency is to claim that if bad people seem to be able to do something better than good people, then problem must be with the definition of doing something better. Thus if the cell biologist David Sabatini is thought guilty of sexual misconduct, that trumps any contribution he might have made had his lab taken away from him. But since that leaves begging the question of the importance of that contribution, the response is to say the idea of genius is hierarchical nonsense and that thus firing someone who is deemed to have behaved immorally and oppressively will do science no significant harm.
Another expression of this moralization is the relaxation of testing requirements, and evening a recent case, the sacking of a science professor considered by his students (and presumably by his university’s administration as well) to have been too severe a grader. Butt given the present ethos, it could hardly be otherwise. Yes, perhaps we may know from sports that being good at something and being a good person have little to do with each other. But at the moment at least, the pressure to pretend this does not apply to medicine or physics, or, for that matter, sculpture and poetry is all but irresistible. If we judge people on their goodness rather than their fitness, or, to put it another way, if their goodness is their fitness, then to reject someone on the basis of their grades is an affront to their humanity just as to accept someone despite their moral affronts (real or imagined) is an affront to our humanity.
It seems obvious that we are entering a world whose good intentions will destroy what is good about this civilization without improving the many things that are cruel and monstrous about it.