This is because from the vantage point of wokeness, being criticised for not treating all groups the same is like a monotheist being told off for not honouring the household gods. If you don’t hold something sacred, you won’t care if someone accuses you of sacrilege against it. And for the woke, objectivity and even-handedness are not just impossible, they’re stalking-horses for privilege. So the old-school liberals of both left and right can only stare with mounting outrage, as people carry on professing wokeness despite the fact that its doctrines aren’t reasonable, or fair, or even trying to be objective.
For secular rationalists, especially the conservative ones, this is prompting a fear that we’ve hit Peak Reason. And indeed, from this perspective it’s not nice to contemplate the possibility that we’re not advancing at all, but instead sliding down the other side of the arc of progress back into the mire of Belief. But really, these grumblers should get over themselves: it’s the secular rationalist worldview which is the flash in the pan.
It’s been barely half a millennium since we first started trying to dethrone God, and barely decades since we mostly succeeded. But if you take a longer view, morality and religious doctrine have been fused in human cultures for as long as humans have had cultures. Far from being a devastating own, the more religion-like wokeness is, the more seriously we should take it.
This also means debates about what does and doesn’t get you banned on Twitter are not idle at all. Rather, they’re debates about an emerging and increasingly powerful faith’s moral orthodoxy, and what will get you excommunicated. In other words, debates about types and degrees of sin and blasphemy.I’m not saying wokeness is Christianity in disguise. As Antonia Senior argued in January, the new faith does lean heavily on Christianity – but it borrows as syncretically as the Romans did. Its vision of the good is far from clear, if it exists at all. But regardless, it should be obvious by now there’s no point trying to resist the apostles of wokeness with the tools of secular reason.
No one who saw the internet go bananas last week because ‘baby witches hexed the moon’ can agree that all we need to deliver a rational, moderate and tolerant world is to chuck religion in the bin. Christianity is on its last legs in the West today, but it’s not obvious that the world is becoming more objective, rational, moderate and tolerant as a result. Rather, these days it’s secular reason that’s looking a bit cringe.
The triumph of Reason over Faith proved short-lived. Like water that’s been dammed, the religious impulse found new channels. As Tara Isabella Burton argues in her book Strange Rites, religiosity is reappearing in strange places, such as gym culture, Wicca – and, with growing dominance, wokeness. Woke liturgy is disjointed and its doctrines still fluid, but my bet is that the woke struggle sessions Gavin Haynes calls ‘purity spirals’ are in truth theological debates, and will solidify to a proper catechism within a decade or so.
To survive the transition back to a religious world, we should study the one that existed before Faith ebbed away under the sign of progress and enlightenment. We’ve already gone some way toward mob punishments for heresy, so we should also dust off the medieval era’s more sophisticated approach to theological debate: disputation. This scholarly art allowed sensitive theological issues to be discussed, even sometimes between faiths, with some protection against being too vigorously cancelled. If religious passions are back, we’ll need all the scholastic tools we can get.
We could do with some medieval pragmatism too. Consider, for example, King Canute, an 11th-century monarch praised by sycophants for his absolute power, who responded by commanding the sycophants to watch as he ordered the ocean’s tide to stop coming in.
Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum reports that when the tide, predictably, came in anyway, Canute then said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”
Canute was clear-sighted about what was or wasn’t in his control. Those secular rationalists protesting the returning wave of Faith might take a leaf from his book. Instead of ordering the tide to withdraw, it’s time to learn to swim — which means, in practice, that none of us will have the option to be unbelievers for much longer. Instead we’ll all need to embrace one faith or another.
My suggestion is: pick a good one. If you refuse, you’ll end up having to profess wokeness anyway.
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