LEFT IS NOT WOKE – a review

Sectors of the left have divided progressives in ways that undermine their goals. Wokeism is fashionable but it comes with large problems. A wise philosopher explains how.

Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke is a timely, compelling, and necessary book. For me, it is also personal.

Neiman is an adept philosopher and public intellectual who has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and this is the latest of her nine books. Her upbringing in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement sealed her identity on the left. She has lived for years in Berlin, where she lectures and serves as the director of the Einstein Forum. Neiman, in this book and others, has been a staunch defender of the Enlightenment. In the current volume, she contends that the left has abandoned its Enlightenment foundations, gone astray, and ironically serves conservative interests.

Clearly, her critique does not pertain to the left in its entirety, but to those elements that have appropriated a woke agenda. As she notes in the book's introduction, Neiman proudly identifies as a leftist (not a liberal,which on her continent signifies libertarian) and as a socialist.

As with Neiman, I am a child of the `60s and the antiwar movement. I have written earlier essays on the emergence of identity politics as the basis of tribalism which ominously fractures American society. It has also divided the left in ways that leave me feeling betrayed. Political positions and ideologies that have shaped my identity are carried on in the name of a progressivism I cannot recognize. Left Is Not Woke validates my discomfort and does so with tremendous power vested in far-reaching erudition and expressed with compelling clarity.

Neiman lays out her thesis at the beginning of her text:

“What concerns me most...are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.”

To those who proclaim that the problem of dealing with threats and wokeism coming from the right requires our primary attention, Neiman contends that only if the left can heal its divisions can the right be successfully challenged. She notes, “The right may be more dangerous, but today's left has deprived itself of the ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the right.”

Here in a nutshell is the dynamic inherent in wokeism:

“Can woke be defined? It begins with concern for marginalized persons and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to a focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma.”

“Reducing each to the prism of her marginalization” is the central dynamic concept that drives her thesis. It is a current political phenomenon that defines au courant leftism that disturbs me greatly as well. Identity politics has forsaken universalism and replaced it with a politics of group interest which pits one group against others and in which victimization is a prevailing currency. At the same time, a recognition of supervening political and economic powers and interests that mold and govern the values and lives of society as a whole have been abandoned.

She cites the late sociologist, Todd Gitlin, who commenting on identity politics noted:

“On this view, the goal of politics is to make sure your category is represented in power, and the proper critique of other people's politics is that they represent a category that is not yours...Even when it takes on radical temper, identity politics is interest-group politics. It aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place.”

It is those rules that require a broader, abstract, and universal commitment. Identity politics has coalesced into tribalism. On the left, tribal identities, Neiman avers, are two: race and gender.

It is reductionism, the fixation on race and gender and the consequences that flow from it, that has spawned a vicious tribalism, a vaunted and destructive valorization of victimhood, a bewitchment with an ideology of power inequities, and a destructively distorted politics.

It should be self-evident that this reductionism is empirically false. A person's selfhood and identity are far richer and more diverse than where they are placed within the framework of race (isn't it an irony that racial identity has become a political obsession at a time when science denies the reality of race?) and one's gender. As Neiman states:

“A moment's reflection shows even those (i.e. race and gender) to be less determinant than supposed. The life of a black person is dramatically different in America and Nigeria...And being Nigerian is only an identifying description outside the country; in a land whose citizens are divided by fraught histories and more than five hundred languages, saying you're Nigerian means nothing at all. Being a Jew in Berlin and Jew in Brooklyn are experienced so differently that I can assure you they amount to different identities. A Jew in Tel Aviv has another identity again; but a Jew born in Tel Aviv has a fundamentally different stance in the world than a Jew who moves there later in life. Is there an Indian identity that holds equally for Hindus and Muslims, Brahmins and Dalits? Can you identify someone who is gay without mentioning whether he lives in Tehran or Toledo?”

She quotes the historian Benjamin Zachariah:

“Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive, somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, but now this is the only so when it is done by other people. Self-essentializing and self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered empowering.”

Stupid and anti-intellectual. It was my mentor, Cornel West, assuredly a race man, who emphasized that every culture is a product of “radical hybridity.” Every culture is comprised of a multitude of sub-cultures adhering to different values, and people are often at each other's throats.

Universalism, which used to be a hallmark of the left, by no means decries diversity. What it does call for is the capacity for abstraction that speaks to a universal humanity. And it is this universalism that allows for a richer appreciation for diversity, even as it emphasizes as a foundational value that all human beings share a common nature. It has also been, and ought to be, the basis for progressive activism. All people are capable of feeling pain as I do. All people strive for recognition of their dignity. As Neiman correctly observes, “Appealing to the humanity of those being dehumanized is the universal form we use to respond to oppression everywhere. That Jefferson and Kant did not practice what they preached is no argument against the sermon.” Tribalism, by contrast, “...is a description of civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else.” For woke politics, identifying people by their race and gender is all that matters. Facts, details, nuance, individual values, and beliefs within those all-encompassing categories command scant attention when rendering political assessments. We inhabit a tribalized world constructed on the axis of crude ideologies in which power inequity is the sole dynamic: oppressors and the oppressed, victimizers and victims. 

Neiman draws on her scholarship of the Enlightenment as its defender at a time when the Enlightenment is under attack in academia and among those on the left who see it as little more than a source of political oppression. Among the values the Enlightenment proffered, and which created the modern world, were reason, universalism, objectivity, and equality. The politics that concern Neiman are no doubt a product of postmodernism, which has made attacks on the Enlightenment a centerpiece of its theorizing and which Neiman cites only implicitly.

Among Enlightenment critics, reason, its capacity to objectify “the other,” and its alleged role in creating totalistic frameworks of order and hierarchy, have been held responsible for creating the evils of European imperialism, colonialism, the oppression and genocide of non-white non-European persons.

Neiman directly takes this and related claims to task. In the first instance, to assert that the Enlightenment was the source for the emergence of colonialism, genocide and, the slavery of non-white peoples and others unlike themselves is to be profoundly blind to history. Didn't the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Mughals, Aztecs, and multitudes of pre-modern people also build empires and perpetrate the subjugation and slaughter of others centuries before the modern era? I once spent a morning with the famed ethicist, Peter Singer. Singer is Australian, and I posed the question to him about the claims that the Enlightenment was the cause of the horrors and oppressions that have been a tragic reality of the modern world. I recall him recounting to me how evidence had revealed the wholesale murder of thousands of indigenous New Zealanders by a neighboring tribe many years before the white man arrived in that part of the world. Clearly, people do not need the categories of Enlightenment reason, science, and hierarchical taxonomies to fuel or legitimate paroxysms of hate, cruelty, and murder. Modernity has undoubtedly brought its frustrations and problems, but a unique capacity for cruelty, violence, and oppressing others is assuredly not one of them. To so believe is simply not to look and to be led by a misguided romanticism as to the presumed goodness of pre-modern peoples.

Neiman furthermore claims that an informed reading of the Enlightenment, despite contrary assertions, is not Eurocentric. It's an important corrective to what are facile allegations that the Enlightenment was uniquely responsible for the panoply of modern atrocities. Assuredly, one can find in the writings of Enlightenment luminaries, Hume, Kant, and Voltaire, among others, disparaging and bigoted remarks about Africans and non-white peoples. But the Enlightenment emerged as a movement in opposition to the absolute claims of religion and ecclesiastical authority. In defiance of that authority, Enlightenment luminaries powerfully asserted the role of reason, free inquiry, and tolerance. In so doing, despite incomplete knowledge, they often invoked the achievements and superiority of non-European cultures.

Here it is instructive to quote Neiman at length:

“There are few challenges more bewildering than the claim that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. Perhaps those who make it confuse eighteenth-century realities with the Enlightenment thinkers who fought to change them – often at considerable personal risk. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they're echoing a tradition that goes back to Montesquieu, who used fictional Persians to criticize European mores in ways he could not have safely done as a Frenchman writing in his own voice. Montesquieu's The Persian Letters was followed by scores of other writings using the same device. Lahontan's Dialogue with a Huron and Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage criticized the patriarchal sexual laws of Europe, which criminalized women who bore children out of wedlock, from the perspective of the more egalitarian Hurons and Tahitians. Voltaire's sharpest attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese emperor, and an indigenous South American priest...the Enlightenment was pathbreaking in rejecting Eurocentrism and urging Europeans to examine themselves from the perspective of the rest of the world.”

“Enlightenment discussion of the non-European world was rarely disinterested. Its thinkers studied Islam in order to find another universal religion that could highlight Christian faults. Bayle and Voltaire argued that Islam was less cruel and bloody than Christianity because it was more tolerant and rational.”

“...it's fatal to forget that thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant were not the first to condemn Eurocentrism and colonialism. They also laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand, together with a robust assurance that cultural pluralism is not an alternative to universalism but an enhancement of it.”

It is such universalism that has laid the groundwork for future progressive movements, which in our time, as noted, has been jettisoned in favor of tribalism, and tragically, reason is now identified with oppression.

The salience of tribalism and the valorization of non-Europeans feeds into a political construct hewn along the binary of victims and victimizers. Here Neiman's analysis is especially compelling. As a human rights academic and activist, I have long acknowledged that human rights starts with the victim. Victims of human rights abuse merit primary consideration. Neiman would agree. But I have long argued that being a victim is a condition; it is not a virtue. What matters most is what one does with one's victimhood.

Neiman cogently develops this thought. She prefers to return to the model, as she states, in which claims to authority are focused on what a person does to the world and not what the world has done to you. This approach “allows us to honor caring for victims as a virtue without suggesting that being a victim is one as well.” Yet in our current political moment, being a victim and the experience of powerlessness is construed as an inevitable basis for political authority. “Victimhood,” she notes, “should be a source of legitimation for restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether.”

For the woke left, a world of victims and victimizers is a world suffused with power for which the philosophy of Michel Foucault is the reigning academic authority. For Foucault “power is everywhere.” “Power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” Power, as Neiman observes, “was woven into the very fabric of our language, thoughts, and desires.” The yen for power is insinuated in all human institutions and political strivings. Neiman concludes that Foucault is a nihilist. In his worldview, justice, recalling Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, is nothing but a masked expression of the self-interests of the powerful.

Power consumes not only justice but reason. This contention has been a mainstay of those who bash the Enlightenment. As Neiman asserts:

“Twentieth-century thinkers as different as Foucault, Heidegger, and Adorno were united in viewing what they called 'Enlightenment reason' not merely as a self-serving fraud but even more as a domineering, calculating, rapacious sort of monster committed to subjugating nature – and with it, indigenous people considered to be natural. On this picture, reason is merely an instrument and expression of power...reason is a more polite but manipulative way of hitting someone over the head.”

But the falsity of the equation should be virtually self-evident. Reason's function, as Neiman notes, is to uphold the force of ideals. It is to question experience and spur us to move toward something better. It is to imagine that something could be different. But to view reason as merely a form of power is to ignore the difference between violence and persuasion, and persuasion and manipulation.

A more complete review of Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke would include her critique of evolutionary psychology, which she sees as negating altruism and reinforcing the self-interest underlying tribalism. It would also include her commitment to progress, which a Foucauldian philosophy denies, and which needs to be reclaimed. 

Sectors of the left have fallen prey to ideologies that have caused it to undermine the very goals for which progressives have long struggled. Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke provides a brilliantly argued, compelling, and necessary corrective. This book merits urgent attention. 

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