The case of Lindsay
Shepherd highlighted the issue of free speech on university campuses We are witnessing an irrational demand for the endless purging of sin from the body politic, writes Kingsley Jones
If you are reading this then you are concerned about ‘wokism’, about the fact that the tone of our political and social disagreements is growing ever more strident, that we seem to be on the verge of a new age of witch hunts.
But then how did we get to this crisis point? And what is ‘wokism’? Firstly, if we regard wokism as the desire to divide the world into camps and to exclude those who don’t belong (cancel them) we must acknowledge that we have not diagnosed a disease but have merely identified its symptoms.
And even if we insist that ‘wokism’ is an irrational moral crusade, a religious zealotry which demands that we acknowledge our sins (racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.,) and then absolves us from them (frees us from persecution!) on the condition of public confession and renunciation, we have still fallen short of a complete description of its pathology. To illustrate my point, let’s take a well-known instance of the operation of cancel culture, let’s examine again the case of Lindsay Shepherd and see if we can uncover that pathology.
Remember that Lindsay Shepherd was a junior teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, who in a class on communication chose as a teaching tool to show her pupils a video of Jordan Peterson talking about gender, a choice that resulted in Ms Shepherd being brought before a university disciplinary committee.
In the course of this meeting, the committee made various accusations against Ms Shepherd, but their key allegation was that their investigation had been prompted by a complaint from someone in the communication class, although they refused to divulge any further details, on the grounds of confidentiality. The committee members were unaware that Ms Shepherd was recording the meeting and when she released the recording publicly the ensuing controversy led to the disclosure that no such complaint had been lodged against her.
Why did the committee think that their desire to discipline Ms Shepherd and ‘cancel’ Prof. Peterson justified their lying about the complaints? Obviously, this is a very crude form of end justifies the means argument in which the means was the telling of a lie and the end desired the silencing of certain kinds of political argument in order to protect vulnerable groups from harm (so the committee believed its role was to create a safe space for the oppressed and in so doing to act as a committee of public safety). Thus, the situation had two salient features for the committee members: this was a political conflict and a skirmish in which truth was a weapon.
Morality
It is not just that morality here is being subsumed to a belligerent form of politics – there is an underlying history, beginning with the scepticism of Enlightenment theorists about the objectivity of moral principles and their search for new principles that could justify moral behaviour. As in the political arena, the revolutionary ferment of the Enlightenment generated the formation of the modern left and right, and the ethical the conviction emerged that there are no absolute prescriptions of morality and that such prescriptions can only be justified within some larger narrative (defending the cause of enlightenment against the forces of reaction, advancing the cause of workers against the depredations of predatory employers or defending unjustly marginalised identity groups against reactionary opponents). In each case, morally questionable behaviour is sanctioned by the exigencies of political expediency (whether for a Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety in 1790s Paris or a university disciplinary committee in the twenty-first century).
But how can such ideological judgments about morality be warranted? And how can the ideologues who make them have such confidence in their ideological narratives when so often these ideologies have changed or even been refuted? By answering these questions, we will also resolve the conundrum of wokism.
Our wokist protagonist might protest that there is a deeper continuity in these heterogeneous ideological narratives, an underlying theme of the emancipation of the oppressed, a quest for freedom that makes these narratives intelligible and confers legitimacy upon them. The significance of this imperative of emancipation arises from the context in which our protagonist imagines it to be enunciated, for this quest always takes place in the midst of conflict. This quest for freedom is essentially a war between freedom seekers and freedom deniers.
Freedom
Here freedom is an absolute value beyond which there is no appeal and which constitutes the precondition of the realisation of any good. Therefore, there can be no rational adjudication of competing visions of freedom; all that remains is a war in which the side you choose is determined by your experience of conversion or aversion to a quasi-religious crusade of the righteous, those who have history on their side in their quest for freedom for its own sake, and one which on its own terms warrants the behaviour of an organisation like the disciplinary committee in the Ms Shepherd case.
This grandiose vision of historical destiny, to which the committee committed itself, is essentially fideistic: one sees the inevitability of the struggle, one perceives its righteousness and one commits oneself to it. The essence of wokism is this, the assurance to its adherents (such as disciplinary committees in contemporary universities) that they are on the right side of history and that this righteousness validates any course of action they choose and condemns anyone who opposes them.
The premises of wokism are irrational – a matter of faith not reason – and thus it is not surprising that it bears the marks of a cult: the Gnostic division of the world into righteous and unrighteous; the demand for the endless purging of sin from the body politic; the reliance on rhetorical appeals to emotion; and the use of intimidation to silence opponents and suppress the voice of conscience. But such an irrational philosophy could not succeed were it not in fact parasitic on truly rational beliefs that rest upon a genuinely progressive vision of redemption in history, one founded upon the precepts of an objective morality.
Thus, if wokism is the anti-rational and immoral antithesis of a genuine philosophy of historical destiny, then we can complete our pathology of the wokist ‘disease’ by prescribing for it a rational and moral ‘cure’: that is, insist on the rational intelligibility of the world, respect the requirements of basic morality in our actions and resist the temptation to resolve conflicts by irrational means. In such a world, the quest for freedom ceases to be merely a matter of personal autonomy and becomes instead the quest for emancipation from the constraints of irrationality, from the effects of sin.
We should not be surprised that the committees of public safety are most active today in North America, or that currently it is the most susceptible to the spirit of wokism. After all, North America has a long history of awakenings, of fideism and of apocalyptic expectations. However, the same continent also has vast untapped resources of wisdom, ‘the better angels of our nature’, and in awakening to the truth about woke, it will also have the opportunity to awaken to its real historical destiny.