Quietism, wokeness, and the bewitchment of language
Quietism, wokeness, and the bewitchment of language
A powerful feature of human psychology has become a major obstacle to sane political debate.
As a Quietist — someone who believes that a lot of our political and philosophical problems emerge, in part, from confusion about language — I’ve always been fascinated by the mind’s compulsion to imbue words with objective meaning. I don’t mean by this our ability to interpret the substantive meaning that language often conveys; I mean that when we encounter language, we take for granted that it must be about something.
Think about Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
When a child (or adult, for that matter) hears this poem the first time, the question is always the same: “What does this mean?” Because we take for granted that the poem must mean something. Even when the author declares that it means nothing, and that the words are pure nonsense, the mind rebels; 150 years later, Jabberwocky’s Wikipedia article still has an entire section on possible interpretations of the words. In grad school I took a course by Roger Lathbury that specifically focused on nonsense writing, and this poem in particular — and despite that, I still had to double-check, while writing this, that Jabberwocky is still generally understood to be complete gibberish.
Why do we think about language this way? Perhaps it’s habitual: we spend so much of our lives in the presence of words that mean things that we just assume that this is how it must always be. The more likely explanation, however, probably has to do with baked-in features of human psychology and cognition. Babies somehow decide that words mean things without any habit of doing so in the past; unless they have serious brain damage, something about the way that they make sense of the world inevitably pushes them towards this conclusion.
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I’ve been thinking about this tendency a lot over the past few days, and particularly in the wake of this exchange:
For quite some time now it’s been perfectly clear that the right is using “wokeness” with a certain lack of intellectual precision. A while back I started documenting all of the different ways “woke” is used, and eventually just had to throw up my hands; it would almost be easier to document the ways that woke isn’t used. Often it’s tempting to understand the polysemy of wokeness as a feature, not a bug; perhaps it’s a cleverly designed dogwhistle that means something like “fringe academic theories of oppression” on the surface but “basic egalitarianism” underneath.
But Mandel’s reaction seems at odds with this. Placed in the spotlight, why couldn’t she just use the modest and diplomatic first definition? That’s the entire reason it supposedly exists: to keep you from getting rhetorically cornered! The more plausible explanation, I think, is that Mandel really does think that she has been talking about something that isn’t just basic egalitarianism. This is, after all how, reactionary politics are often rationalized: you arrive at the same conclusions as reactionaries, and decide that their politics must be supported, but for complicated idiosyncratic reasons that makes you different from them. Surely wokeness exists: one can infer it from the fact that Mandel cannot just be attacking egalitarianism and tolerance, since that would make her a bigot, which is impossible. And anyway, why would everyone be talking about wokeness if it didn’t actually exist? The same psychological compulsion that makes babies assign meaning to words drives us to the inescapable conclusion: like Jabberwocky, wokeness must mean something.
You can also see a trace of this way of thinking about wokeness in the right’s defenses of Mandel:
So which definition is it? Leftists point out that “wokeness” does not actually have one — and the right responds by floating at least four different definitions in a single thread. This makes no sense if wokeness is an abstraction like “two” or “darkness”, something that only has any kind of analytic or explanatory value if it has a minimally consistent and specific meaning. But it makes perfect sense if one imagines that wokeness is a thing in the world with some kind of independent material existence, something that different people can describe differently with perfect consistency. It’s like calling a dog “that animal”, or “the doggy”, or “Gingersnap”, or “your pet”; these are all signposts pointing in the same direction. Reactionaries have reified wokeness into some kind of force that exists separately from our ability to describe it; they see themselves like scientists trying to explain dark matter, certain that it must be there and simply left to flesh out the details and hone in on the right explanatory theory.
That said, you really haven’t grasped the insanity of the wokeness debate until you see liberals making the exact same move:
Even some lefties are doing it!
Read through this one and you’ll find our seventh idiosyncratic definition of wokeness; and like everyone else, Freddie advances it with the exact same authoritative just-so rhetoric. You may recall that he ran the same play with Critical Race Theory too, rolling his eyes at left attempts to impose some minimal clarity on the debate. We never, of course, got any kind of follow-up when it became clear that the right was using CRT as a Trojan horse to attack socialism, which would seem to justify left concerns that this word was operating in a very different way than its critics would admit.
I cannot, in any case, see how you can look at the contemporary discourse on wokeness and not see a hilarious battle royal of belligerents talking right past each other. Imagine if you were learning English as a second language and trying to derive the meaning of “wokeness” from these seven texts. You would probably get that it had something to do with racism and anti-racism, and perhaps with other identity issues like sexism — but surely it isn’t just that, right? You might think that it was about things like climate change, or socialism; look elsewhere, and you might think it’s about regulation, or price-caps, or pork-barrel spending, or housing density. But this is just starting to sound like vague liberal-left vs. right politics, and it’s not just that, right?
Maybe, like a good ESL student, you’d decide that the dictionary could resolve this:
But it can’t just be that, can it? Freddie told me that wokeness is about academia, and immaterialism, and fatalism, and so on. Wilfred Reilly at The National Review insists that “it isn’t hard at all to define wokeness”, but his definition is also different, revolving around narrow equity critiques of meritocracy. I assume that Freddie and Wilfred appreciate the problem with trying to score points here by pointing at the dictionary and saying “duh”; but their solution, which is saying “duh” while pointing at their own posts, seems even worse.
If I were learning English, my instinct at this point would be to consult Wikipedia, or to find some other encyclopedia; but those definitions are hotly contested, too. So we’re back to the question we started with: where does this instinct coming from? Why are babies, ESL learners, Wikipedia editors, Tweeters, Substackers, and legacy journalists so convinced that woke must mean something, even though all the evidence we have shows people using it in substantially different ways?
I have no doubt that there are, within this discourse, all kinds of very real and important disagreements about substantial concerns. But it seems quite clear to me that there is also a fundamentally psychological obstacle at work here: a profound and nearly universal inability to recognize that language is instrumental. Our baby-brain compulsion to imbue words with objective meaning is so powerful that defending that meaning feels like a defense of reality; everyone is saying “wokeness means this” with the exact same emotional tenor of declaring that the sky is blue. No wonder everyone is talking past each other! If someone told me that the sky is red rather than blue, I wouldn’t be willing to debate that, either.
But “wokeness means this” is not a claim about the world in the same way that “the sky is blue” is. This is the sort of error that ends in what Wittgenstein called “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language”; everyone here is trapped in a purely semantic impasse imposed by mutually exclusive definitions and an inability to see that one can work around this problem. It’s an impasse that’s emerging not from the politics or the logic of the argument, but from the nature of language itself — from its tendency to reify itself in our minds, and the deliberate, attentive effort it takes to remind ourselves of its counterintuitive instrumentality.