Seek truth. Seek justice.
What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned . . . commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.” —
Susan Neiman, “Left Is Not Woke,” quoted by Herb Rothschild.
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Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild
Jules Feiffer, who was a staff cartoonist for the Village Voice from 1956 to 1997, may have been the most widely read satirist in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. His was sophisticated satire, and his most frequent targets were aspects of the liberalism that dominated politics and East Coast culture from the end of World War II until the advent of Ronald Reagan. I want to share a Feiffer strip I remember well.
As with many of Feiffer’s strips, each panel depicts a single person talking. In this case it’s a conservatively dressed Black male, and he’s speaking about a party he had recently attended in the expensive Manhattan apartment of a white couple.
He says that other guests kept coming up to him to talk about the Civil Rights movement, how it is so inspiring that freedom and equality are being championed. He would reply that he doesn’t think about the movement that way. Rather, he thinks that it’s been a long time and he just wants his. Upon hearing this, the guests would drift away. In the last frame, though, the speaker argues that he did his part to advance the movement. Because of him, such hosts now invite two Blacks in case the first one doesn’t work out.
That’s sophisticated humor. First, Feiffer assumes that all his readers favor the civil rights movement, which wasn’t true nationwide at the time. But second, he punctures the self-delusion of those among his readers who live at a privileged distance that they are aligned with those in struggle. Third, it assumes that many of his readers are sufficiently comfortable in interracial relations that they (unlike the party guests) don’t require Black people to present themselves to whites as “credits to their race.”
What I don’t think is an object of satire in that cartoon, however, is the very ideas of universal freedom and justice. It can be interpreted that way, and had Feiffer been infected by woke theory, I might be inclined to agree. Fortunately, he wasn’t. His critique of liberalism wasn’t an attack on the Enlightenment values on which liberalism drew so heavily, even if those values can sound vapid when referenced by his cartoon liberals.
For those who believe that theorists like Michel Foucault successfully pulled back the veil of Enlightenment values to expose the fundamental self-interest behind them, the encounter in that Manhattan apartment would confirm his view that all social interaction is a jockeying for power.
Understood this way, the white guests are framing the civil rights movement as an affirmation of ideals, not as a quest for shared wealth and control, so they can preserve their control. Once practical accommodation is demanded — once a call for Black power replaces the call for universal brotherhood — their support quickly wanes. There’s some truth in that reading, but it becomes dangerous if it’s taken as the entire truth.
To better understand what’s at stake for us here, let’s consider a more familiar text: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
As a schoolboy, I found that those truths did seem self-evident. So did many other universal statements about life and how it should be lived. I wasn’t a cynic as a child and I’m not a cynic now.
Which is not to say that I think as a child. Of course I know that many signers of that document, including its author, were slaveholders and had no intention of treating African Americans as equals or recognizing their unalienable right to liberty. Of course I know that it would be hard to find one of the signers who believed that, in practice, “men” stood for both men and women, so normal was the subordination of women in the world they knew.
But what should we do with such historical knowledge? One possibility is to say that our Founding Fathers’ declaration was window dressing for their power play against King George. They believed their economic self-interests would best be served if they could legislate for themselves. One doesn’t even have to argue that they knew their appeal to universal values was window dressing. Self-deception is no obstacle to deceiving others.
From such a starting point, U.S. history is not a story of the gradual although still incomplete realization of its ideals but a continual contest for power among distinct groups. That is a woke way to view and to teach our history.
It was not Martin Luther King Jr.’s way, although he was clear about how long and how woefully those who held power had betrayed the values they professed. Here is how he put the matter at the 1963 March on Washington: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”
Cynicism isn’t synonymous with realism. As I’ve argued before, leftist identity politics is a mirror image of rightist identity politics. In no regard is this truer than their cynicism. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may be the most cynical person now prominent in U.S. politics. “Florida is where woke comes to die” has been an immensely successful power play, disguising in principled terms his appeals to white and straight supremacy. DeSantis is both wrong and right about Florida — wrong because he has lent confirmation to the woke assertion that all discourses are discourses of power, right because he has diminished the power of those the woke left presumes to champion — peoples of color, women and non-heterosexuals.
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17 comments:
It’s interesting to see the way ‘woke’ has evolved on both the left and the right. Originally it referred to the need for Blacks to remain alert to the danger of being Black in America. Now, according to Herb Rothschild, on the left it’s become a view of U.S. history as “a continual contest for power among distinct groups.” Meanwhile, on the right it’s become a political buzzword used to describe anything deemed too liberal or progressive – things like Affirmative Action or the Voting Rights Act.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I hope he knew what he was talking about, but it can be hard to believe when half the electorate in the U.S. supports a monster like Trump running on a platform of retribution. When I read that “all men are created equal” and consider the gross disparities that still exist in in education, healthcare, incarceration rates etc., I can’t help but agree with Lily Tomlin that “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”
Thank you, Herb, for a refreshingly nuanced view.
MLK Jr.’s vision, even affirmative action in theory, bespoke positive corrective effort, but not the kind of addition which is of necessity achieved only by corresponding subtraction (as with quotas). The zero-sum approach posits grievance and injustice from any imbalance in power or influence, past, present and future. Wealth and achievement are presumptive ill-gotten gains, from either cheating or unfair advantage. People and groups are properly fungible for most purposes, and hence are villains and victims to the extent they diverge from mathematically comparable outcomes. No other variables need apply. Equality and social justice are thus located at the lowest common denominator. In practical terms on today’s illiberal, anti-capitalist left, that means pathologizing the nation-states of modern Western civilization as if nonpareil villains across globe and time.
Swap identity groups or cultural favoritism for the classic Marxist class struggle and, even when well-intended, the baby is thrown out with the bath water, as in so many costly, death-dealing instances in the last century. There are always kulaks of some sort. Sinister teachers, in Cambodia. Marxism and its permutations almost invariably dampen creativity and innovation, pathologize institutions and traditions, undermine merit, and view achievement with suspicion. Instead of effacing group/identity differences, the ostensible goal at the outset, those differences are calcified, reified. The Western liberal democratic tradition is no breeder of utopia, but it’s much, much further from dystopia than its alternatives to date. Moreover, as we see right here as elsewhere, unlike for instance in China, or Iran, or Cuba, it’s actually capable of regular reflection, debate and correction.
“In practical terms on today’s illiberal, anti-capitalist left, that means pathologizing the nation-states of modern Western civilization as if nonpareil villains across globe and time.”
Sounds reminiscent of when white-wing pundits like D’Souza, Gingrich, Huckabee and Giuliani were lamenting Barack Obama’s “anti-colonialism,” as if it were some kind of evidence he hated America – never mind that our Founding Fathers’ anti-colonialism created the Uniited States.
The notion that 'woke ideology' has anything to do with the ages-old conflict between Arabs and Jews shows how meaningless the term has become.
Mike speaks of the "ages-old conflict between Arabs and Jews." He is very wrong historically. Jews found safety and opportunities to flourish in the Muslim world when European Christians were murdering them all during the Middle Ages and when they were expelled from countries like England and Spain. The conflict between Arabs and Jews is recent and attributable to the displacement of Arabs in Palestine by Jewish settlers. It has become toxic as Israeli oppression of Palestinians continues and intensifies. Thus, among other tragedies associated with the Israeli determination to occupy all the land it asserts that God originally gave to their Hebrew ancestors is the poisoning of a relationship that had been, relatively speaking, a happy one for Jews.
Q.E.D.!
Dr. Rothschild—
Doesn’t the Quran contain passages reflecting the Prophet’s growing antipathy towards Jews, as his own ambitions surpassed Medina and Mecca? Centuries of comparative tolerance of Jews accompanied Muslim conquest and subsequent control of Jerusalem.
Some scholars date the conflict between Arabs and Jews back to Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham's sons. But whether it's been going on for ages or only for generations, I would hope we can all agree that it's been too long,
The “anti-colonialism“ of our Founding Fathers, had absolutely nothing in common with the anti-colonialist ideology of the woke critical social justice left, which is basically Marxism, repackaged to make it more appealing to folks who do not understand the vicious and dysfunctional nature of communism.
Jews were tolerated in the Muslim world as “dhimmis”, lesser beings who always had to be subordinate to Muslims and pay a special tax.
When Zionist Jews started coming back to their ancestral homeland in the late 1800s, they did not come as conquerors or “settlers.” They came back by buying land from willing Arab sellers. Unfortunately, many Arabs in the area did not want to see Jews among them, and began rioting and committing pogroms against their new neighbors, including 1929 in Hebron, where they wiped out a Jewish community that had been there since biblical times.
In following the search of Critical Social Justice provided by Michael, we find a lot of conflicting verbiage but no “highly precise and well-defined meaning.” Basically, like Critical Race Theory, it comes across as an imaginary boogeyman concocted to manufacture outrage among the gullible.
It is truly said, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
In response to the Arab defeat in the 1948 war, a wave of vicious antisemitism swept through the Arab world, and the Jewish populations in those Arab countries were expelled. There were actually more of these Jewish refugees than Arab refugees.
Most of these Jews came to Israel, where they are now known as the Mizrahi. They comprise more than half of the Jewish population of Israel.
The Jews accepted their refugees and made them part of Israeli society. The Arabs rejected their refugees and kept them in horrible refugee camps for generations, where they remain to this day. These Arabs are who became “the Palestinians.“
The creation of Israel was about as well thought out as the partition of India, and the consequences are still being felt.
One of the consequences of the creation of the state of Israel, is that Jews have somewhere to go when antisemitism rises up, as it always seems to eventually. Given our history of thousands of years of persecution, if anyone deserves their own state, it’s us.
And now we have one, complete with a strong military and (many people say) nuclear weapons. No one is going to take that away from us.
How would you explain my Jewish ancestors being the lowest-low and spit on (and forced to flee) while living in Persia in the mid-1800s? Probably before that, as well, but that is the earliest we have accurate history about. Sorry, your understanding of history leaves me baffled.
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