The Woke Code of Morality Was All Nonsense

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

 

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile.

 

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

 

For more than a decade now, our universities, our media, our HR departments, and our celebrities have terrorized us with a bunch of vicious dogmas that, it turns out, they never believed in for a moment. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “equity” and any other abstract concept that might plausibly be recruited to the obscurantists’ side, Americans were asked to subordinate their freedom, their conversations, and their consciences to the personal preferences of a handful of unelected arbiters of taste. And then, one terrible day in October, a real barbarity was staged, and, within a few hours of the rules being applied to its apologists, the whole enterprise was revealed to be a brittle sham. Who among us could have predicted that?

 

Lest you worry, that isn’t a serious question. That the Sensitivity-Industrial Complex was nothing more than a front for the advancement of progressivism has been obvious to most thinking people for a long while. That the ruse would be rendered so obvious by a single international monstrosity, however, was not. I had assumed, given the amount of effort that had gone into its construction, that the architects and adherents of Woke America might at least pretend to live by their own entreaties for a while. I was wrong. Instead, they turned on a dime. One day, they were telling people who do not think that women have penises that there remained no place for them in polite society; the next, they were explaining how important it is that college students be able to celebrate genocide in public — and even be reimbursed for it. All of a sudden, it wasn’t so important to “speak out” as it had been before. Overnight, the claim that “all lives matter” became self-evident, instead of a slur. Without warning, the banishment of students who make rhetorical mistakes moved from mandatory to outré. The transformation was remarkable — and complete.

 

It was predictable, too, for, beneath the extended game of Calvinball that is contemporary wokeism, there has never been anything more substantive than grubby self-interest. When selling their wares, the peddlers of America’s byzantine speech codes have cast themselves as the enlightened reformers of a rotten status quo. In truth, they are the precise opposite. Every tinpot dictator in human history has recognized the power that lies in the circumvention of free debate, and it is to this unlovely tradition that our contemporary censors have fallen heir. Superficially, they may appear to be the friends of the downtrodden, but, once one digs a little deeper, one discovers that the game has been rigged at all four corners, and that each and every one of the invoked terms — “harm,” “violence,” “marginalization,” “trauma,” et al. — is malleable enough to yield any outcome that is desired.

 

In Israel last week, we witnessed a heinous terroristic attack on one of the most relentlessly targeted groups in human history. The civilian victims were raped, mutilated, beheaded, and set on fire by a group of perpetrators that, by its own admission, does not consider its targets human and desires to extirpate their kind from the Earth. That the group that was affected by this abominable crime was not covered by the censors’ expansive protective superstructure — indeed, that, instead, that superstructure was hastily abandoned — reveals how worthless and self-serving the whole edifice was, and how cynical its designers have been. Had the progenitors of “belonging” been acting in earnest, the moment would have prompted a Dunkirk. Instead, we got a lot of hemming and hawing, followed by a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

 

We noticed.