A central contention of my new book The Third Awokening (Taboo in the UK) is that in order to understand woke, we must grasp how the emotional tissue of western societies altered fundamentally with the rise of an unbounded anti-racism taboo in mid-1960s America.
Intellectuals love to talk about ideas such as liberalism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, ‘strategic essentialism,’ Critical Theory. But, as Jonathan Haidt points out, our conscious cognitive selves are like riders on an elephant, making up stories about why we (the elephant) are moving in a particular direction. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky write, we ‘aren’t rational, we rationalize.’ Stories, symbols and particular attachments to things in the world, not idea systems and abstract principles, are what drives our elephant.
When thinking about the origins of woke, historians of ideas often draw attention to what I term our moral cartography. The explicit ideas that justify policies. In the 1960s and 70s, equality, sensitivity and pluralism were important. In the 1980s and 90s, self-esteem, multiculturalism, patriarchy, diversity and the ‘Eurocentric’ curriculum of ‘Dead White Males.’ In the 2010s we hear about microaggressions, whiteness, unconscious bias, emotional safety and other woke buzzwords.
The idea that language - words, signs and narratives - can uphold a system of structural oppression is core to the worldview of critical race theory, queer theory and radical feminism. Postmodernism is the deconstructionist side of this wrecking ball. The idea of a kind of cultural Marxism in which Marxists gave up on class in favour of identity lies at the centre of the arguments of writers as various as Frances Fukuyama, Yascha Mounk, Helen Pluckrose, Chris Rufo and James Lindsay
They are correct, if we follow the way our moral cartography evolved. That is, if we trace the supply side of the culture through the words of elites and how each influenced the next.
But what this misses is the demand side. Why do certain ideological constructions resonate with people’s sensibilities while others fall flat? For all its popularity among academics (as much as 25% of social science faculty in some surveys), orthodox anti-capitalist Marxism has bombed in large organizations and the culture at large.
This brings me to the idea of moral topography. The emotional highs and lows attached to particular acts and ideas. These underpin our everyday moral order, but filter up to anchor our dominant ideology.
Cultural anthropologist Richard Schweder’s Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology talks about how different cultures instruct their people about which emotions to express and repress. This is the central idea behind the sociology of emotions and the study of emotional regimes in history.
Schweder argues that our emotional responses are not just universal, arising out of biology, but are tied to concrete things in our world. That is, we have ‘particular scripts for particular situations and objects.’ We learn which facial expressions (surprise, anger, disgust) to use for particular interactions. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality explores the texture of how we learn from others’ reactions (or via social instruction) how to behave and respond in particular social interactions. Where did you learn to shake hands, for instance, or dress appropriately? When did you become aware of taboos against incest or not defecating in the street?
Schweder shows that these emotional responses differ widely across the world. In a number of societies there is a taboo against menstrual blood, particular animals such as pigs, or certain castes of people such as India’s Untouchables. They are all viewed as being unclean or impure whereas others, such as people in the West, would consider this ridiculous. These ideas form part of a kind of folk ideology that is of a piece with the kinds of taboos I mentioned above around incest or defecating openly.
The same particularism holds for expressing emotions: for instance, some societies Schweder mentions such as the Ilongot or Eskimo (now Inuit) seek to suppress the expression of anger, as this is viewed as a dangerous emotion, unlike in the West. We likewise learn when to feel depressed or traumatized - even as there is also an untutored biological component to these feelings which can be suppressed or expressed by a culture.
Emotional attachments seem to evolve largely through bottom-up peer-to-peer shifts (in 1996, for example, it suddenly became acceptable to fly the formerly ‘far right’ England flag during football matches), though ‘deliberate’ attempts from elites to construct new norms can also alter a society’s folk ideology. Religions which decree which animals are sacred and impure, and which rituals to observe, as well as which practices (such as not washing feet before entering a temple) offend the gods or spirits of ancestors also help to structure the folk ideology of a people.
Even so, ‘the done thing’ often falls outside the formal edicts of religion and thus is beyond the sway of intellectuals with their blueprints for ‘marching through the institutions.’ Order is to a considerable extent spontaneous and emergent, as in a complex system like a flock of birds, where no one bird is a ‘leader’ with a vision of how the flock should behave and where it should go. A few simple rules about staying apart from neighbouring birds or avoiding predators is all that is needed to produce emergent flocking responses - which happen to be evolutionarily adaptive.
Now consider the folk ideology and associated emotional regime of the contemporary West.
Let’s begin with an example: opposing class and race prejudice is part of our moral cartography of ideas. This flows from the consistent liberal principle of not being prejudiced against someone on the basis of characteristics that people have little control over. But our moral topography of emotions assigns a much higher emotional charge to race than class prejudice. In fact the moral volume on racism is turned up so high it forms a taboo which chills anyone accused of it, cancelling those found to be even remotely guilty of it. It incentivizes race hoaxes, stokes moral panics and enriches race hucksters. Class prejudice barely registers, though it arguably should given how important socioeconomic background is to life chances and wellbeing.
Powerful stories and symbols underpin the anti-racist dimension to our moral order: most people know about slavery, lynching, Rosa Parks and the deeds of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Over time, accretions such as the American/Canadian/Australian conquest of the indigenous, the evils of British colonialism and stories of anti-immigrant prejudice have been added to this stock of emotionally evocative meanings. When it comes to class there is, by comparison, a mytho-symbolic desert.
Ideological pressure and deliberate communicative action played some role in this alignment, but much seems to have occurred gradually via trends in public attitudes crossing a tipping point. This is true of race, where liberalization of attitudes between the 1940s and early 60s preceded the sudden emergence of the American race taboo.
We are taught to feel warm and protective emotions toward the descendants of those wronged by these episodes (or those who look like people who were wronged) and anger and hostility toward the descendants of those who did wrong (or those who look like those who did wrong). This is reinforced both in institutions like schools and workplaces and in everyday life. If we show insufficient respect to a person from a sacralized identity group, they - or members of the majority who set themselves up as the moral enforcers and protectors of minorities - reinforce the message that we have transgressed a sacred value by expressing their anger and shock. If we praise white people, masculine culture or otherwise laud historically advantaged groups we get a disgust response. This is the equivalent of wearing shoes into an Indian temple.
Much of this happens online when we are accused of racism, transphobia or some other transgression for speaking disrespectfully about a cherished group, or policies and symbols such as Black Lives Matter, which are styled as defending a totemic group. Outrage entrepreneurs and those that press the ‘like’ button on the entrepreneur’s tweets to cancel a moral transgressor convey the message that blasphemers should feel guilt and shame for upsetting a totemic group, or being seen to show insufficient respect towards it. The same reaction would hold if a menstruating woman from the Oriyas of India that Schweder wrote about were to deliberately touch a person in her community and this became widely known in the community. Mobbing behaviour is about policing boundaries of the sacred and profane, pure and impure.
All of which is why my definition of woke centres on the idea of the sacred. Namely, I define woke as ‘the sacralization of historically-marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups.’
The Big Bang of this sacred moral order is the anti-racism taboo, which effectively assigns an 11 out of 10 moral charge to anti-racism. It is the Mount Everest of our moral topography. Sexism, homophobia and transphobia also get high scores, but the height of these symbolic mountains is not quite the same, perhaps they are more like the Swiss Alps with fatphobia akin to the foothills of the Rockies or low ridges of the Lake District in England.
Breaking down anti-racism into its sacred objects, we find blacks and indigenous at the top, with Asians and Muslims below, though Jews also have a place at the table. Occasionally we see blacks and the indigenous fighting for symbolic supremacy as in the case of one Canadian academic spat between the two groups for administrative spoils (whose details escape me and my Google searching). We certainly see this between Muslims and Jews, with Jews losing points because they are seen to be white, western and, in Israel, a dominant majority and ‘settler-colonizer.’
This however does not mean that you cannot be cancelled as an anti-Semite for using a term like ‘globalist’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ or criticizing George Soros. The salience of Nazism and the Holocaust is also a central pillar of western culture, what Pascal Bruckner terms the West’s ‘Golgotha, as if Christ died there.’ Here again, while our moral topography recognizes that many genocides have taken place (Cambodia, Rwanda, Armenia, Yugoslavia) and genocide is wrong, these do not have the same symbolic centrality as the Holocaust and Slavery or even the conquest of native Americans, Canadians or Australians.
Why are the crimes of the left, such as the tens of millions killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other communist regimes largely airbrushed from popular consciousness? Where are the movies, novels and class reading lists to bring them to life? While one could make the argument that the left’s crimes involve sins of omission and negligence while those of the right are intentional, the reality is that this is a very blurry line.
Some of our selective view of the past may be contingent and accidental. For instance, 60 percent of Americans believe that native peoples lived in ‘peace and harmony’ before European settlers arrived even though the reverse is true (a result I have replicated with a separate survey platform). This has its roots in the ‘noble savage’ romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even if it also benefits from a leftist overlay. That said, it is arguably also true that the liberal left, who have dominated intellectual life in the West since the early twentieth century, played a key part in foregrounding right-wing transgressions while backgrounding those of the left.
Regardless of how we got here, the abstract philosophical lines on our ethical map (moral cartography) suggest we oppose all atrocities on principle. But our moral topography decrees that our emotional anger, disgust and outrage should be far higher for particular sacred events such as the Holocaust and Slavery than for others.
The sacred events are central in our culture in a way the others are not - be this in education, on television, or in popular understanding. We could in theory devise measures for the objective ‘badness’ of certain atrocities rather than others, in terms of scale, suffering and intentional cruelty. But this is not how our system of myths and taboos arose. Even today, we largely turn a blind eye to atrocities in Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia, or slavery in China or the Muslim world, as compared to the excesses of the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza.
To recap: our moral topography tells us how to emotionally respond to concrete reality and to the past. It is our folk ideology, rooted in powerful stories and images. This topography was radically changed by the advent of an unbounded anti-racism taboo in mid-1960s in America on the back of the civil rights movement, which spread to other categories (like sex and sexuality) and other countries. Much of this happened under the radar, without any elite plan to ‘march through the institutions’ - even if left-liberals loaded the dice. The emotional regime we inhabit arose out of this critical juncture.
The contours of our moral order also explain why symbols related to sacralized identities, such as Pride or Black Lives Matter, are centered in our public signage and calendar of high holy days. In terms of moral cartography, these are merely illustrative groups for upholding an abstract moral principle of toleration, non-discrimination, justice and freedom. Others would equally have sufficed.
However, in terms of moral topography, the emotional valence of LGBT and black people is much greater than that of the lower class, mentally ill, disabled or unattractive - not to mention historically discriminated-against groups such as Catholics or Freemasons (in Anglo-Protestant countries). Most of Harvard’s blacks have a West Indian or African non-slave background, and its Latinos are more European than Indio, but this is a non-issue as ethnicity and skin shade fall outside the purview of the sacred.
Equality symbolism in organizations always leads on the white/black, male/female, or straight/LGBT binary with barely a tip of the cap to class or various forms of disability. Left-wing parties have all-female shortlists and recruit racial minorities but don’t really mind if there are no working-class or non university-educated representatives. The excuse is always ‘let’s do race and gender first then get to the rest’ but the real reason is that class lacks the emotional elevation that sex and race possess.
For this reason we must understand Pride Month and Black History Month as political, not universal. While we can all agree that racism and homophobia violate our ethical principles, we do not agree that race, gender and sexuality should suck up so much cultural oxygen. We agree on the cartography but not the topography. Those of us on the anti-woke side want a de-centering of these sacred totems. Let’s put all disadvantaged or under-represented categories in a bag, select from them at random, then divide by the emphasis we are willing to put on discrimination/representation/victimhood in our culture as against other values (freedom, excellence, community). This will necessarily yield a vast reduction in the attention paid to LGBT and black people in our schools and institutions - and in the culture in general - even if this greater than zero. The misnamed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ ban goes too far but is trying to express the popular feeling that the holy identity trinity of the left (race-sex-gender) should be de-centred, and is distorting our sense of reality.
My stress on moral topography doesn’t mean the particular attacments of woke haven’t generated any universal ethical claims. Its sacred attachments were nourished by the springs of universalist left-liberalism, which knocked off communism, classical liberalism and fascism to become the dominant ideology of the West. The woke trinity of race, gender and sexuality in turn generalizes into an inductive ‘oppression points’ ideology of competitive victimhood which does allow fat, neurodivergent or deaf people to plug into a victimhood identity politics framework. There is a dialogue between the particular sacred emotional attachments and the principles that emerge inductively from these attachments.
Still, fat models and actors are not going to dominate our screens because they lack the symbolic capital that historically-marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups possess. There is a fuzzy left-liberal dominant ideology in the West based on the care/harm and equality moral foundations, but this system of principles is the rider, not the elephant, of our moral order.
Our moral topography was created in the late 1960s, initially in America. In the ensuring three decades it produced affirmative action quotas, ‘disparate impact’ / ‘indirect discrimination’ reasoning, political correctness, anti-white multiculturalism, diversity training and speech codes. Critical race and gender buzzwords of the 2010s are continuous with these earlier manifestations of progressive illiberalism and deculturation. All are powered by the same underlying moral-emotional topography which determines which constructs strike a chord and which do not.
We can talk about cultural Marxism, postmodernism and other aspects of moral cartography all we like, but until we moderate our moral topography in line with a set of principles and plane the sacred heights of our identity taboos down to size, we will always be one viral video away from the next Awokening.
The foundation of our new moral order is the idea of STIGMA and its eradiction or reversal in the name of Justice and Equality, the sacred abstractions that take the place of God in our liberal, secular dispensation.
"Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies or trailer-park studies because these people are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely economic selfishness." Richard Rorty
"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in 2020 at the start of Covid.
That last quote tells you all you need to know about the sacred beliefs of our global technocratic leadership class: at the start of a global pandemic, when it was still possible that we had a new Black Plague on our hands, Stigma was claimed to be more important than life or death itself, a value higher than humans, their families or their societies.
But the goal of this crusade is not the eradication of Stigma, but its reversal or transference, moving from groups and people who once bore it to groups and people who once benefited from it: hence things like anti-racism which is a project to shift the Mark of Cain from black people to white people, or "cis" privilege, which aims to take the shame felt by gay or Trans people and place it on the people who mock or oppose them. (This is all a perfect example of Nietzsche's "Transvaluation of Values").
It seems like human societies always need taboos, In and Out Groups, Good/Evil and their incarnations, and the Crit Theorists were brilliant in how they captured post-Civil Rights morality and gave it a hard-edged Marxist Manichaean twist—with bigotry accusations working for them in the same way as accusations of atheism and heresy worked in prior centuries for prior theocrats.
Social Justice morality seems to me to be the inevitable terminus of secular multiethnic liberal societies, where the Self and its feelings of worth and safety become the new sacred, and as the years pass this new morality may lose some of its punitive force and anger, but I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
…and how do we plane the sacred heights of our moral taboos down to size?