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Transcript
As we’ve explored woke left thought in the last few chapters, you may have found yourself nodding in agreement from time to time, or even often.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Liberals and the woke left see many of the same problems in society, from structural oppression to alienation.
And yet the ideology of the woke left is incompatible with liberalism.
We’ve seen why that is from the perspective of the woke left, which sees liberalism as a form of oppression. In the next chapters, we’ll look at it from a liberal point of view.
It starts with the very idea of wokeness, as an awakening from illusions, or false consciousness. The goal is supposed to be liberation.
But to liberals, this kind of liberation can look more like tyranny.
It boils down to this: If I’m woke and you’re not, I see everything more clearly than you do. I have escaped from the prison of oppressive illusions in which you are still trapped. These are the illusions that create what Foucault called the “carceral state,” as in “incarceration.” That means that if you disagree with me, I may decide your opinions are simply wrong, or oppressive.
No matter what my motivations, the logic of our relationship is now inherently tyrannical.
Set aside my motivations. And set aside whether I’m right or wrong about whatever it is we’re discussing. The point is that I get to decide and you don’t. Having decided that you are wrong, I may choose to indulge you in further debate. But if I follow the logic of wokeness strictly, I may decide that further debate will only legitimize your wrong or oppressive ideas. Instead, I may try to educate you, but if that fails, I may have to cancel you.
And I can do that in the sincere belief that I’m pursuing liberation, yours and everyone else’s, because every time you repeat your wrong or oppressive ideas, you’re only strengthening those prison walls.
Again, my intentions may be entirely benevolent. But the logic is tyrannical.
And liberals can’t support tyranny of any kind.
It’s a deep irony of history that tyranny often originates in a desire to liberate people. And often that desire springs from the discovery of what’s believed to be a source of higher awareness, which will liberate us from ignorance and evil.
Often the source of higher awareness has been divine revelation, as in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.
Often the source is secular: not the One True Faith, but the One True Theory. A primary example is Plato’s theory of the eternal Forms of knowledge.
In each case the world we inhabit is revealed as mere appearance. The new awareness awakens us to a higher reality.
As the Apostle Paul describes it:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.
Plato writes:
When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the intellectual world where truth is, there is sight and light.
When someone has an experience of this kind of liberation, they may want to help others have it too. They may conclude that the best way to achieve that is to define the path one must follow to freedom. And it’s a short, logical step from there to concluding that deviation from this path must not be allowed. Thus revelation becomes dogma.
And liberation becomes tyranny. It’s the paradox of liberation, found in many liberationist ideologies: freedom requires obedience.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau captured this paradox in a chilling phrase that he apparently meant sincerely: Sometimes, he wrote, people have to be “forced to be free.”
In dogmatic religions, priests force people to be free.
In dogmatic philosophies, philosophers do.
Plato provides the model here as well.
He believed most people were trapped within a world of appearances. They were like prisoners in a cave, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality. But philosophers could escape. By studying the Forms that truly defined reality, they would be liberated from the delusions and desires that led most people so badly astray and made it so easy to manipulate them.
The freedom promised by Athenian democracy was really a form of slavery to ignorance and to those who knew how to exploit it: Sophists, who were masters of rhetoric divorced from truth, and demagogues, who exploited the passions of the mob.
Therefore, logically, philosophers should rule. In his book Republic, Plato describes the ideal society as a dictatorship of philosopher kings.
Many a philosopher since has agreed with him.
And like Plato, they would swear, sincerely, that they weren’t pursuing tyranny for themselves but freedom for everyone: freedom from illusions and the suffering that results from believing in those illusions.
That definition of freedom has reappeared in many ideologies throughout history.
As it does in the history of woke thought.
We find it in the prototypical form of wellness described by Karl Marx.
In Marx’s work, Plato’s cave-dwellers show up as the proletariat in its unconscious state. The shadows on the wall are the illusions that make oppression look like inevitable reality. The liberating, higher knowledge of the Forms becomes communist consciousness.
And I’d say there are philosopher kings, too, although Marx would strenuously deny that. He disdained both philosophers and kings as superfluous. Once the proletariat awakened into communist consciousness, it would rule itself.
Based on what we’ve seen in actual communist nations, we might assume that communist party officials would rule. Not according to Marx. In the Communist Manifesto, he writes that the Communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the workers as a whole.”
And yet Marx can’t escape the paradox of liberation. As experts in Marxism, communist intellectuals know the workers’ interests before the workers do. So they’re in the position of knowing when the workers have and have not achieved consciousness. A few sentences later, Marx describes why the Communist party is different from other workers parties. The Communists “point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat.”
But in order to do that, they have to know what the common interests of the entire proletariat are — and are not. They will be the judges. And judges have a different rank than the people who stand before them.
Marx comes closer to acknowledging this elsewhere in the Manifesto. He grants that some workers will never embrace communism. These he calls the lumpenproletariat, or “social scum.” He predicts they will betray the revolution as “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Presumably, someone will need to judge who is a proletarian and who is social scum.
Even after the revolution, a temporary dictatorship will be necessary until the revolution is secure. Marx calls it a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But some smaller group will have to judge, and enforce, what the entire proletariat dictates — the true proletariat, not the lumpenproletariat. Philosopher kings again.
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin pointed out this contradiction in his 1873 book Statehood and Anarchy. Bakunin wrote:
The question arises, if the proletariat is ruling, over whom will it rule? This means that there will remain another proletariat which will be subordinated to this new domination, this new state.
Marx argued back, but unconvincingly in my opinion. You can find that argument in a standard reference, The Marx-Engels Reader.
It seems to me the logic is inescapable: If there’s a higher awareness that we all should live by, someone has to know what it is, and isn’t. Marx argued that everyone would know, once they all became conscious. But in all of history, there’s no record of that happening. A doctrine of higher awareness always requires an elect class of guardians of the doctrine, whether they be priests, or philosophers, or, I would say, .
And in practice, in every communist nation, it’s turned out that the dictatorship of the proletariat never ends — and that it‘s always run by an elect who somehow know what the workers really want. In the Soviet Union, the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Many Marxists have argued that tyranny is the result of the corruption or sabotage of Marxism, not Marxism itself. But when a doctrine defines disagreement as dangerous, its logic points towards tyranny.
The consequences aren’t always as terrifying as show trials and gulags, or inquisitions and holy wars. Most tyranny is petty, not grand, producing not dictators but dogmatists, as in the dogmatists who insist that every discussion must be framed within woke Theory.
And let’s remember that many good, tolerant people have been inspired by believing they’ve found a higher form of awareness, whether through religion, philosophy, or otherwise.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time here on the potentially tyrannical influence of Plato, but Plato also gives us Socrates.
Socrates insists on asking questions. The risk of tyranny looms when people believe they’ve found answers, especially if they think they’ve found the answer, to all questions.
One of the most important characteristics of liberal freedom is that it allows for there to be many answers, or none.
The scary thing about that kind of freedom is that it can feel a lot like being lost. And people will do a lot to avoid that feeling.
More on that coming up.
Thanks for listening.
Image: Plato, Silanion Musei Capitolini. © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.
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