Christianity, though, was the challenger ideology that would not and could not be assimilated. Just how far Christianity assimilated Rome is matter of debate, but the concept of “Christendom” grew from Rome’s ruins — defining Europe, the West and ultimately the modern world.
The question therefore is whether wokeness today is remotely comparable to the role Christianity played as Rome crumbled. Note that I’m not talking about how much wokeness owes as an ideology to the worldview that Christianity built — I’ll leave that debate to the likes of Tom Holland. Rather, I’m asking whether wokeness has the capacity to offer a unifying vision of such compelling power as to overwhelm and supersede the existing order.
And here the answer is clear: it does not.
First, wokeness is too geographically limited in scope. The impact that it’s made so far depends on conditions that apply specifically to the United States of America — especially in regard to that country’s history of slavery, segregation and ongoing racial discrimination. The global reach of social media helps to explain why the Black Lives Matter movement made waves far beyond America; but it does not change the very different context of race relations in other countries.
Even a country with as revolutionary a history as France has made it abundantly clear that American-style wokeness will not be taking root in French soil. Whether that’s expressed by the ruling establishment centred upon President Macron or a youth vote that’s shockingly skewed towards the far-Right, we English-speakers need to remember that we are not the world.
Second, unlike the Christianity which spread among ordinary people before converting the establishment, wokeness comes from the elites and continues to wield its greatest influence there. It is not a popular movement; it is remarkably unpopular, in fact.
Perhaps, like Protestantism during the Reformation, it doesn’t have to be. Given the control that the elites have over political, economic and cultural institutions, it may be that rest of the population just follows along behind: Cuius regio, eius religio (‘whose realm, their religion’) as they used to say in the 16th century.
Except that these days, voters aren’t so keen on being treated like a bunch of peasants. In the wake of Brexit, the Labour Party tried to pull that trick in their heartlands and it didn’t end well for them.
Third, wokeness doesn’t even begin to match Christianity’s intellectual depth. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo? It’s not exactly Saint Augustine’s City of God, is it?
No doubt that’s an unfair comparison, but if you put the intellectual heavyweights of the contemporary Left up against the best people from the other major schools of political thought — liberalism, conservatism, even classical Marxism — there’s no doubt as to who’d win the wooden spoon.
The jargon and buzzwords of wokery are easily grasped, a rhetorical framework that just about anyone can assemble and deploy on Twitter. But with so little substance behind each component, they quickly become worn out. Already, terms like “safe space” and “trigger warning” are beginning to sound very last decade. The biggest threat to wokeness isn’t whiteness or the patriarchy, but fashion.
Fourth, wokeness is viral in the proper sense of the word — i.e. it doesn’t do much except reproduce itself (and even then parasitically, by subverting pre-existing institutions). The demands of the movement centre upon changes to language, symbols and patterns of thought. Beyond that, real world policies such as “defund the police” are so wildly impractical as to have rhetorical relevance only.
Clearly, wokeness appeals to people with legitimate complaints against the status quo — especially younger people. But in focusing on extremely generalised theories of injustice rather than specific, fixable failures in the system, the contemporary Left is singularly useless as an agent of practical change.
Finally, the ruling establishment doesn’t have to keep stitching up the younger generation. There is no need for a radical new ideology to fix problems like student debt, unpaid internships, the housing crisis and all the other ways in which Millennials and Post-Millennials have been let down by their elders.
Indeed, the more that the elites adopt woke ideology to distract attention from these failures, the sooner that the young will realise they’ve been had — and the sooner they’ll move on to the next protest movement.
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