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Psychology
The Psychology of "Wokeism"
Hate requires the obliteration of context.
Posted August 9, 2021 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Wokeness, in my view, is a good thing, as I have often blogged (for example, here). Awareness of unfairness in the treatment of others not only makes the world a better place and us better people, it creates a culture in which the marginalized receive empathy instead of blame. Everyone has marginalized thoughts, feelings, and desires. Everyone has a history of managing unfair expectations and humiliations. A woke culture would be a pleasure to live in for everyone.
But every movement is susceptible to becoming the thing it despises. Nietzsche said it best, perhaps: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Power theory teaches us that every system develops a subsystem that initially makes rules that are good for the system, but, eventually, that governing subsystem makes rules that are good for itself. George Orwell ended Animal Farm with the disgusting image of pigs imitating their human oppressors.
On the political left, wokeness sometimes drifts into wokeism—a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others, and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others. It’s not hard to see how wokeism benefits the intolerant: others have written extensively about the woke Olympics and topping from the bottom. How ironic that the antiracist insight—that policies with disparate racial impacts proliferate because they benefit one racial group—applies to wokeism, where cultural practices with other disparate effects proliferate because they benefit other identity groups. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
You'd have to be pretty concrete not to grasp that if it's wrong to assume you know a black woman's experience based on her gender and skin color, it's wrong--for exactly the same reasons-- to assume you know a white man's experience based on his gender and skin color. But there are reasons that so many otherwise empathic and circumspect people check their empathy and circumspection when expressing their wokeness. The primary reason was expressed by Aldous Huxley: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” Hitler—Hitler!—was repulsed by what he called the “mean-spiritedness” of the German people in their zeal for denouncing each other.
In other words, we’re all human, we’re a rather vicious species, and we like to cause damage, so a really popular program will satisfy aggressive urges. The analogy between mistreatment of others and mistreatment of ourselves also applies to Christians and Jews. Many Christians, historically, knew it was wrong to persecute Christians because of their religion, but they missed the analogy to mistreating Jews because of their religion, not because they believed the Old Testament had been replaced or because they blamed Jews for the Crucifixion, but because the “righteous indignation” that Christianity offers in the story of the Crucifixion depends on missing the analogy.
Hate cannot stand up to analogized, contextualized empathy, which is why Critical Race Theorists organized their scholarship around storytelling. Hate requires the obliteration of context. This is well-known to trial lawyers. When juries decide whether to impose the death penalty, defense attorneys present evidence concerning their clients’ difficult childhoods. (Everyone had a difficult childhood, so it’s not hard to find such evidence; well, everyone did if you are capable of understanding “difficult” as context-bound and relativistic, which is how it is experienced by the child with the difficulty.)
Forensic psychologists know that the key supports for violence—the ultimate form of hate—are dehumanization and desensitization. Hatred is deflected when its objects are humanized, which is why wokeism won’t stand for the idea that everyone deserves sympathy and respect, that everyone is marginalized sometimes—that no one is “more equal than others.” Hatred is encouraged when those around us take expressions of hatred, such as wokeism’s humiliation of white people and men, in stride, desensitizing the group to the maltreatment of others.
Nietzsche put it like this: “Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.” Thinking unconditionally, or un-contextually, characterizes wokeism. Behavior is condemned regardless of its reasons: if you feel offended (and you’re not a white guy), you were offended. A patient sought therapy because her sex life with her husband was tense, and the therapist had to sensitively manage the patient’s trauma history. Upon presenting the case, some of the students ignored the context of trying to help the woman and concluded that the therapist thinks women should serve their husbands sexually!
What I like so much about what I have read of Critical Race Theory and antiracism is the focus on changing formal and informal policy rather than on deciding whom to hate. Ibram X. Kendi would be the first to say that he is a work in progress, and that is a hard position to take when you’ve already won a National Book Award and had a follow-up bestseller at the forefront of the national conversation. Yes, he says a lot of things I don’t agree with, but surely the main message of the book is that hate does not lead to change. “When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them.” Presenting himself as a flawed individual on a long path to wokeness, for me, overrode any quibbles I had with him, and the big idea—change policies, not people—was eye-opening.
When I teach why “evidenced-based practice” is not suitable to psychotherapy, I start by explaining why it is suitable to medicine, using the example of breast cancer screening. Evidence-based practice integrates scientific knowledge (which shows that mammography saves a certain small number of lives), clinical skill (adeptness at reducing the complications and anxiety of fruitless exams, biopsies, and surgeries), and patient preference (only the woman can weigh the risks and benefits). Dare I say the word “breast” in a classroom, though, that has the sexual harassment office on speed dial? If you don’t think I can get investigated or even fired for that, then I don’t think you understand hate.
