Foucault And The Bogus War For Social Justice

Modernity and the phony wisdom of wokeness

For the politically correct crowd, there’s supposed to be a peak of postmodern enlightenment called “wokeness.” You’re “woke” if you’re aware of the subtle and systemic discriminations and oppressions that happen all around us; in that case, you fight for social justice at every opportunity. Otherwise, you’re asleep and part of the problem.

But what exactly is this neo-enlightenment and how does it compare to the aim of the period known as the modern Enlightenment or to ancient religious awakenings?

Hyperskepticism and Foucault’s Genealogies of Power

As expressed in intersectional feminism and critical race theory, wokeness draws its inspiration from postmodern European thought, particularly from Michel Foucault’s account of the pervasiveness of power dynamics and from his histories or “genealogies” of how conventional knowledge is constructed to support various social orders. Also foundational is critical theory’s sociological explanations of individuals’ behaviour as being dictated by social structures.

Generally, though, as a late-modern ideal, wokeness rests on hyperskepticism. This is to say that over the last couple of centuries, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, modernity has curdled and its cognitive tools which had originally undermined premodern religious dogmas have turned on the secular myths or “metanarratives” that were supposed to replace them.

Foucault, for example, critiques the modern conception of the individual or of “man” or everyman, arguing that whereas all humans (or at least white male elites) are supposed to have personal potential as autonomous, rational, creative beings, attention to history reveals instead a variety of subjects, not any generic personhood. For Foucault, this idea of the person or of the individual as such is a social fabrication. Just as industries mass-produce merchandize for sale, the ideology of the modern, progressive subject is manufactured to drive secular society.

Moreover, this fiction of the free individual was subject to an ironic turning point, when the modern genius or “Renaissance Man” morphed into the conformist consumer. Foucault shows how this happens in prisons in which the inmates are conditioned or “disciplined” by a totalitarian police state, and in psychiatric regimes in which certain feminine or sexual behaviours are labelled as disordered and deviant.

Rather than appealing to a cabal of power elites or master puppeteers in the manner of conspiracy theorists, however, Foucault treats power as an omnipresent force. Power isn’t wielded only at the top of the pyramid; rather, power flows through every level and inhabitant of society.

The quasi-gnostic film “Cube” illustrates Foucault’s depersonalizing, evolutionary conception of power. In the movie, a small group finds itself kidnapped and trapped in a nightmarish building that functions like a diabolical Rubik’s cube in that its many rooms periodically shift their positions and feature deadly traps as well as obscure clues to an escape. The victims discover, though, that this death trap — which might symbolize natural selection and the evolution of civilized orders — isn’t governed by anyone. No one’s in charge: the whole scheme and contraption emerge from the ground up by countless amoral decisions made by ordinary citizens.

Likewise, for Foucault and his woke followers, we all participate in the regimes that distribute power unfairly. The “objective” knowledge we might think will save us is in turn an instrument of power, an ideology in something like Karl Marx’s sense except that this “superstructure” of myths and cognitive instruments preserves not just the elites who benefit from owning the means of economic production, but the social order and a variant of human nature.

The War for Social Justice

This pessimistic take on the early-modern ideal of secular progress feeds naturally into radical forms of feminism and anti-racism. Intersectional feminism, for example, extends Foucault’s genealogies by positing that there are endless degrees of sexism. There’s discrimination against women in general, of course, but because “women” is just a complicit abstraction in Foucault’s sense, in practice the only discrimination that early feminists revolted against was that suffered by white, urban women.

The intersectional feminist compensates by spelling out the special discrimination inflicted on African American women, for example — and on gay African American women, and on physically disabled ones, and perhaps also on left-handed ones or left-handed, gay, African American women whose first name begins with “M,” and so on. In short, victims can be doubly or triply oppressed, and their victimization shouldn’t be lumped in with that of any other group since doing so would perpetuate the oppression by overlooking the victim’s distinct identity.

As for critical race theorists, they say that racism extends far beyond the prejudices of racist individuals; our institutions turn us into unconscious racists if only by affording certain people more privileges and advantages than others. Our social systems need to be reformed, they say, with a view to enforcing equity rather than just equal opportunities, because a free society is liable to be corrupted all over again, given the inexorability of power’s re-entry into open-ended social relationships.

In practice, therefore, wokesters or “social justice warriors” rail against injustice high and low, large and small — yet their focus is indeed on the low and the small. By pointing out that even microaggressions are real, the wokester exposes yet another subtle incarnation of rampant power. Just as Foucault wrote detailed historical studies so that he couldn’t be accused of contradicting himself by putting forward a progressive metanarrative, the wokester proves the relevance of her political views and the depth of her commitment to justice by tracking down the minutest traces of injustice.

The Incoherence of Wokeness

All of which makes not just for a potential outbreak of socialist totalitarianism, as glimpsed in the cancel culture of Twitter mobs, or for the rise of toxic femininity (of sentimentality and compromise covering up cowardice and decadence), which rivals the perennial strains of toxic masculinity, that is of egoism and subcriminal psychopathy.

Instead, there’s a logically prior problem for wokesters, which is that Foucault’s pessimism and postmodern hyperskepticism are perilously close to entailing nihilism. If there’s no such thing as the self in the modern sense, no cognitive capacities shared by average humans which enable us to be relatively rational, autonomous, and creative, what is the basis of postmodern morality? Why speak of human rights or justice? Why presume that sexism or racism is wrong? If our moral standards are all just Machiavellian fictions, and we’re actors following a social script, why does it matter what happens to us or whether we’re the abusers or the abused?

If ours is the dire Gnostic realm of Foucault’s genealogies, the one ruled by the forces of power which turn us all, masters and slaves, into dupes, why think that the world ought to be different? How could such dupes even conceive of anything better if we’re trapped in the diabolical Cube and our very mentality has been constructed by amoral institutions and conventions? If our capacity for self-determination doesn’t make us free people rather than animals molded by faith in myths and creeds, why suppose there’s any better or worse way of treating us? Why should we worry more about the abuse of humans by other humans than we fret over our enslavement, torture, and slaughter of countless animal species?

Evidently, postmodern hyperskepticism is liable to undermine itself. Let’s make this clear with a little dialogue.

WOKESTER: You just committed a microaggression and should be ashamed of yourself. You told a racist joke. Don’t try to deny it.

RACIST: I told the joke, sure, but what’s wrong with that?

WOKESTER: What’s wrong with it? It’s racist! You’re implicitly discriminating against people of colour. You’re glossing over their individuality and humanity and treating them as a monolithic and inferior race.

RACIST: I suppose that is what I was doing. But I still don’t see why that’s bad. It’s only a microaggression, like you said. So why worry about something so small?

WOKESTER: I’ll tell you why: a microaggression is the tip of the iceberg. You’re only a pawn of the institutions that make our culture so systemically racist — and sexist, oppressive, and lethal to most wildlife to boot. So your racist joke doesn’t exist by itself but stems from colossal, ancient injustices. By condemning your behaviour here and now, I’m really addressing those larger power dynamics.

RACIST: Right, but if we’re all just pawns of much larger forces, why does it matter what happens to us? Why shouldn’t we denigrate, oppress, or kill each other if we feel like it? Why shouldn’t we be sacrificed at the behest of those greater forces? Isn’t sacrifice what pawns are for?

As a form of “enlightenment,” then, wokeness is comparable to Buddhism, which as I argue elsewhere is also liable to be nihilistic and paradoxically amoral. After all, enlightenment is the broadening of perspective, and specifically a broadening beyond the confines of mundane egoism. Instead of viewing each other as friends or enemies, the sage thinks of people in spiritual or cosmic terms. She understands the larger realms at play.

In the case of Buddhism, the idea is that the independence of our mental self is illusory. We’re really nodes in an interconnected field of causality, and once we understand as much, we no longer suffer the disappointment of being unable to satiate unrealistic, self-centered cravings. Indeed, then, the enlightened Buddhist wouldn’t be expected to act selfishly since she’d no longer regard herself as being so important or as more important than anyone else.

The problem is that if everyone turns out to be equally unimportant such that selfishness is irrational, how does altruism suddenly become rational or imperative? Why doesn’t Buddhism imply that all values are wrongheaded? In that case, nirvana would be a state of amorality in which neither selfishness nor benevolence makes any sense.

The same problem of incoherence applies to wokeness or to late-modern, hyperskeptical liberalism. The wokester borrows her moral agenda from modernity and specifically from the secular humanistic conception of the self as a rational, free, and creative agent that creates values. Yet the wokester undermines that conception by subscribing to postmodern skepticism, by going along with the likes of Foucault who denies there’s any such agency.

From the wokester’s mountaintop, where agency is transferred to emergent social forces and to nefarious organizations, and individuals are mere playthings of dominance hierarchies, our moral rights and obligations seem to vanish along with our illusory sovereignty as “modern persons.”

Comparing Enlightenments

How do enlightened secular humanists get around this problem? By not getting carried away with rational critiques, and by noticing that scientific models are relatively objective and that cognitive science shows we’re not inherently so rational. Thus, the soft sciences like sociology, economics, and political science are indeed liable to get caught up in “ideologies,” as in rationalizations of power structures. But that fallibility encompasses the wokester’s critique of society.

Thus, what the wokester needs is more humility, especially the humility to recognize that her absolutist stance against political incorrectness is self-refuting. Wokesters like to think they alone are awake to social injustice. But if that knowledge frees them from perpetrating injustice, it must be possible to reform our systems and to stand against the larger causes of oppression.

But that’s precisely what the long view of secular humanism indicates. Our reason, self-control, and productivity liberate us from the tyranny of the amoral wilderness, freeing us to create our alternative, artificial worlds. We supply the meaning of those worlds by deciding on the laws and cultural values that govern them. The morality that matters to us is subjective since it doesn’t follow from any purely objective statement of fact or natural law.

Our personal nature is the source of right and wrong, just as the early modern philosophers said. But they didn’t invent that idea; they secularized the ancient religious and philosophical insights that go back to the advent of civilization. Organized morality arose to explain the evident creativity of our self-imposed separation from the natural order in the Neolithic period.

Does postmodern hyperskepticism refute those insights and that humanistic self-conception? No, because as soon as hyperskepticism is rationally formulated it becomes self-refuting. What postmodernism is, then, is a one-sided, unsustainable application of certain modern cognitive tools. We push reason to its limit, to the point of casting doubt on the humanistic fictions early-modernists told to glorify the modern project. We thereby forget that reason is a human tool we use to build a world that’s better than the one we find in the wild. We use reason to help us become people rather than animals.

Another cognitive tool is religion, which uses powerful stories to bind us together socially and to enable us to live peacefully and productively even in the large populations maintained by technological advances. At least, religion has those advantages until the clash of civilizations that are led by different religions.

Like the religious fundamentalist who thinks her myths and her creed solve all the world’s problems, the wokester employs reason blindly and with repugnant sanctimony. She thinks she sees the world as it really is and she knows what’s best, forgetting that her alleged enlightenment would be a product of human nature which liberates each of us, to some extent, giving us the right, therefore, to go about our business without being confronted by the mischief, nagging, and bluster from these naïve progressives.

The Terror of True Enlightenment

What, though, should our business be, according to true, secular humanistic enlightenment? Is our progress not indeed destroying the planet’s ecosystems? Isn’t it our very human nature that’s self-undermining? In other words, aren’t we absurd, multisided creatures that are inevitably at odds with ourselves? We create societies which do indeed oppress the majority, so why bother being human? Why participate in this so-called progress when history has never been as innocent or even as wise as was presupposed by the prevailing myths?

What would a truly enlightened person say about all this? I don’t claim to know, but what seems clear is that those whose perspective transcends the mob’s noble lies would have to grapple with inhuman realities that would evidently appall the average unenlightened person.

It’s not obvious that a transhuman, for example, would retreat to what Friedrich Nietzsche called “slave morality” or to the presumption that everyone deserves equal respect. If a transhuman or a genuine sage were to share some of the wokester’s convictions about social justice for minorities and the downtrodden, the reasons would differ. Whereas the wokester grasps at straws to distract from her worldview’s self-contradiction, the sage would empathize with everyone not based on cheap and vain identity politics, but on her profound recognition of our shared existential burdens.

Yet in both science and religious fictions, we fear that vastly superior, extraterrestrial intelligences, for example, would be inclined to condemn most of us, to treat us the way we treat ants underfoot. As in the film “Her,” the transhuman might leave the mass of humanity behind, including the grandiose conceits of our moral sensibilities, because the transhuman would have discovered a higher plane of creativity.

Least of all would we expect the transhuman to harangue the masses as though we could suddenly stop being our unenlightened selves, as though enlightenment were mere wokeness, just another quick fix for a small-minded, self-destructive consumer culture.