Why there isn’t a Woke Right, Part I

Stratification and Cleavages 

I’ve said on occasion that I hate the term “woke”.  It’s just the kind of contentless weasel-word that eludes clear definition and allows people to speak dishonestly by equivocating between the meanings.  In practice, it doesn’t apply to any discrete type of person, but to the more extreme members of what has been called the New Civic Religion.  

The New Civic Religion refers to the post-Protestant belief system that began in the late-19^th to early 20^th Century, similar to what Smith and Denton describe as the “Colonizing Heresy,” Moralistic Therapeutic Deism¹.  Over time, it abandoned its spiritual components and adopted a founding narrative in a mythopoeticized version of the Civil Rights Movement.  It began dropping its spiritual aspects in the late 20^th Century, and emerged as the dominant belief system in the United States around the 2010s, under a variety of ideological, political, and religious guises.  Its principles are still largely moralistic and therapeutic, but with heavy emphasis on a kind of political-ideological purity culture and a quasi-worship of a deified Humanity, to which one shows devotion by acts of egalitarian self-sacrifice.  To be holy in the New Civic Religion is to abase oneself in a sad parody of Christian poverty.  Whereas the monks of old surrendered everything but virtue, the most holy NCRs surrender all virtues and make themselves equals to the worst in society.  “Woke” seems to be merely a synonym for “fundamentalist” in this new faith, which is today the largest competitor faith to Christianity, especially given the widespread delusion that one can be both a member of the New Civic Religion and a Christian.  Once one sees the problem in this way, the notion of a “woke right” becomes absurd.  Nevertheless, the term has come to prominence again recently among a handful of social media commentators, muddying the waters of Christian discourse around the current clash of religions in the West.

Before I begin, however, there needs to be a disclaimer, based on some of the controversy on social media.  To head off some nitwits who think they’ve discovered a secret relationship and a network of far-right conspirators boosting one another’s work, let me divulge that I went to graduate school with Stephen Wolfe.  Although I did not collaborate with him on his book, I did participate in a roundtable discussion of the book at a virtual LSU seminar, in which we mostly talked about the political implications of various eschatological interpretations.  I certainly have issues of my own with his work, in terms of philosophy and political theory, and I prefer a different set of Reformed church fathers than the ones he cited.  I believe he has referred to me as an Anabaptist on occasion, though I prefer Kirkish Independent Baptist.  Nevertheless, I am not in contact with Wolfe nor are we coordinating in some conspiracy to attack his critics, but neither do I bear him any ill will despite our disagreements.

In his article entitled “What is the Woke Right?”, Neil Shenvi defines “woke” as the following:

1) society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc via 2) hegemonic power. But privileged people are blind so 3) we need to defer to the lived experience of the marginalized to 4) dismantle unjust systems. 

I’m glad to see that Shenvi chooses to eschew that common tactic and nails down a definition.  For the purposes of this series, I am going to borrow Shenvi’s essay as my foil because of the excellent job that he does in clearly and honestly stating his position and definitions.  Unfortunately, the definition he gives here blends a number of scientifically valid facts and overgeneralizations with the ideological premises of the so-called “woke” movement.  In this series, I’m going to take his definition of woke along with other essays that are linked to one another and demonstrate that “woke right” is a self-contradictory absurdity.

1) Society is divided into oppressed/oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.

There are two parts to this concept: the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy and the stratification of humanity into classes.  I will deal with these in the opposite order in order to clarify what is true and false in this statement.  

1. Stratification and Cleavages

First, the stratification of humanity into categories is not critical theory but basic sociology, in which this notion is called cleavages.  Cleavages are categories into which individuals fall by virtue of their lived relationships with others who have these characteristics in common.  This is one of the reason that writers like Kevin DeYoung and Shenvi had difficulties with Wolfe’s use of the word “nation” in their reviews.  Personally, I would not have used the word nation in his place, but disambiguated the three modes of human sociality that appear in the text, but this is not a review or critique of Wolfe.  All stratifications represent actual communities and communities-of-communities defined by a living web of human interactions.  

Let me give an example as to how cleavages always represent real networks of human relationships.  Why do we not conceptualize people along the lines of consumer goods preferences?  Are not people, in practice, Coke or Pepsi people?  New England Patriots or Tampa Bay Buccaneers people?  Do you deny that there are people who are Disney people?  Why do we exclude these kinds of relationships when we discuss human social and political stratification?  We exclude them because these distinctions do not create webs of social relationships and dictate patterns of association, in the same way as race, religion, class, and other cleavages.  What makes a distinction into a social cleavage is that a recognizable, perhaps weak, correlation exists between the stratifications and observed human behavioral patterns.  All of these distinctions are social signs indicating in-group and out-group markers, which are significant to the vast majority of people in interpreting their social world and choosing their course of action.  I am not making a normative judgment here; the existence of cleavages is an observed fact about the way that human beings navigate their shared environmental milieu.  

Most importantly, however, is the fact that social cleavages are politically salient and become the ordering principles of most mass-movement political systems.  In democratic systems, people organize themselves according to these cleavages in order to participate in a kind of politics that is far too large for individual participation and consent.  In a mass-democratic political system, individuals are not afforded a means by which to express their preferences and opinions in any efficacious manner, and so they conform to collective blocs corresponding to the various cleavages in society which best expresses their preferences.  In other words, it is impossible to determine if a politician or policy will favorably impact you, personally, but you can interpret a politician’s position with regard to his orientation towards or against the cleavages to which you belong.  Voters are not rational self-interest optimizers because such behavior is logically impossible in a mass democracy.  They vote expressively in accord with those which symbolically present as the representatives of their social fractions.

For example, in a place with an economic/class cleavage between farmers and townies, people will sort themselves by their cleavage into competing factions, and you will get a de facto farmer party and a de facto townie party.  This leads to an ambiguity which befuddles nearly all attempts to interpret identity-based politics; what is the difference between the cleavage itself and the political clique that represents that cleavage in political life?  In other words, if you oppose the set of politicians that represent the farmers, does that mean that you hate the farmers?  When phrased this way, most rational people would reject that conclusion.  Yet, when members of the political right reject the demands and policies of powerful political cliques who represent large blocs of social cleavages, this same logic is not granted.  

The fact of the matter is that there is a deep ambiguity present in modern politics between the behaviors of political elites representing a social cleavage and the moral responsibility of members of that cleavage for those behaviors.  Not all farmers are morally guilty of the bad actions of the Farmer Party politicians, but those politicians are only in power because they can reliably count on the votes of the farmers.  There is certainly an extent to which it is correct to see cleavages as monolithic power structures in this sense.  This ambiguity of moral responsibility is and will remain a significant problem in intergroup relations, especially when one group feels wronged by the political elites representing another.

The most powerful tool of partisan politics is the ability to label any opposition to a power-faction as ethically out of bounds.  Yet it is incumbent on us to realize that this, in truth, is a power-play and not a reality.  The demands of “woke” politicians are inherently political demands, and attempting to label this opposition as “racist” or “sexist” is fraudulent.  Neither is it unjust to counter-organize against political blocs and factions in a political system grounded on these kinds of ethnic, religious, sexuality, or class coalitions.  Democratic organization under the rule of law is grounded on the principle of reciprocity; the precedents set by one group must always be equally applicable to all other political factions under the principle of equal protection of the law.  If these are false divisions, those making this claim need to explain why they are so politically efficacious.  The reality is that they do, in fact, mostly represent actual patterns of human relationships, and this is why they work.  They may be more contrived the larger the political body, but that doesn’t prevent them from appealing to ordinary people’s self-identities.

The real objection, I believe, that people like Shenvi and DeYoung have to cleavage-based political factionalization is that our society was once dominated by what were called “cross-cutting” cleavages, and those cleavages are now dissolving or becoming more “pillarized.”  In a cross-cutting society, a person’s cleavages largely do not correlate to those of their neighbors in a systematic way.  For example, the people in one’s ethnic group will not be the same people in one’s religious congregation, who will not be the same people in one’s neighborhood, who will not be the same people in one’s workplace.  Because all these distinctions are mixed throughout society, every person will have mixed loyalties to different groups.  

On the other hand, American society today is pillarizing, such that it is far more likely that members of one’s immediate social circle share all cleavage identities.  Part of this is due to changes in the way we socialize, especially the rise of online spaces and the abandonment of the public square.  Another major feature is the “great sorting” described by people like Bill Bishop and Charles Murray², in which people are relocating in order to be around people who share these cleavages.  Let me reiterate an important point: cleavages represent real, actual relationship patterns, and so people who are “sorting” are committing no sin any greater than wanting to live by their friends and relations.  There is no moral virtue in living next to someone with whom you share no human relations whatsoever.  Proximity does not equal toleration, but as Darel Paul stated, proximity is the product of pre-existing attitudes³.

Certainly, then, it is better to have a cross-cutting society than a pillarized one, right?  Perhaps.  There are strengths and weaknesses to both patterns.  However, a cross-cutting society is not merely “diverse” but represents real, actual social relationships.  For such a person, one neighbor shares their faith, another shares a workplace, another shares a political identity, and another is a blood relation.  A society in which most people have no shared cleavages with their neighbor is an atomized society, not a cross-cutting one, and the model of diversity we have represents this total absence of human relations.  The condemnation of the so-called “woke right” for their participation in this trend represents a failure to understand what is happening and a recourse to blind liberal ideology about diversity.  

Nobody chooses for their society to be pillarized, atomized, or cross-cutting, and the tools we have at hand to change these things are limited.  One could easily argue that it is immigration itself that contributes to the move away from cross-cutting cleavages towards pillarization and atomization, as Putnam implies in his famous Uppsala Paper⁴.  Ironically, the most scientifically plausible answer to the problem is the one that Shenvi explicitly condemns in the so-called “woke right.”

This is why Shenvi’s argument about ethnic partiality and failing to love one’s neighbor is a non sequitur.  It imagines a type of community that very rarely exists anymore, a socially thick cross-cutting set of cleavages, and rightly condemns the person who would mistreat a neighbor on the basis of a difference of ethnicity.  It would indeed be wrong for a person to show favoritism to a stranger with the same skin color over a person with a different skin color and yet a thick web of living relationships.  This, however, is not the world of most Americans, who can’t tell you the name of anyone living within a one-house radius or within their apartment building.  In an atomized society, there is no difference between the person living next door and the one living on the moon, since one has the exact same social relationship with both of them: none.  

In practice, the diversity of the average American’s circle of actual human interactions is small and shrinking.  Around a quarter of millennials state that they have no friends or casual acquaintances at all, and well over a majority have less than 4 people they would describe as a friend.  Shenvi’s argument regarding the Ordo Amoris falls flat against the fact that we exist largely as a society of total strangers, and therefore treating one another like strangers is not an injustice.  The three “commonalities” that he identifies between all human beings are abstractions that entail no actual human relationship at all.  Sharing a propensity to sin and a need for Christ’s forgiveness does not necessitate a knowledge of one another’s existence.  Only shared social cleavages involve actual human interactions and relationships, which is why the congregation is the actual, living body of Christ and an indispensable element of Christian life representing an actual, perceptible web of human relations.

In summary, there is no epidemic of people being rejected from our social circles on the basis of race because we have no social circles.  It is a reflection of an atomized society in which nobody actually knows one another, and we only interact with others through the medium of social media.  Yes, he is correct that it would be immoral if we were denying certain groups of people the equal respect that we grant to other people who are equals within our social circles.  This notion of ethnic partiality, on the other hand, condemns people for the accident of who happens to be within their social networks most of the time.  It condemns people whose personal friendships correlate to the group that is found around them most often because human beings cluster in groups around shared cleavages.  

Do we really wish to follow the absurdity of the Left and condemn people for the fact that their blood relations are not racially diverse?  As our social circles narrow, we should expect that people are going to be less likely to know people outside their cleavages at all.  This isn’t racism.  This is the consequence of the society-wide, systemic collapse of our cross-cutting cleavages into pillarized and atomized modes of association due to wide-ranging, high-level social forces outside of anyone’s control.  Welcoming the stranger is a moral command because such a thing as a stranger really exists.  Resentful attempts to destroy social relationships in order to equalize society doesn’t abolish the stranger but makes us all strangers to one another.  The kind of society that Shenvi appeals to, where peoples of all kinds mix together regardless of common cleavages, can’t exist.  It is a common utopian trope identified by philosopher Eric Voegelin in ideologies which impatiently seek to immanentize the eschaton and wash away the real-existence of the world in favor of a gnostic dream⁵.  Impatience with the flaws of the fallen world is understandable, but utopian ideologies possess a darker implication of the ideologue’s lust for control over a universe that belongs to God.  When such utopian dreams fail to actualize, it leads to hatred, the politics of scapegoating, and ultimately violence.

Shenvi’s critique of “woke” thought on the basis of political organization around social cleavages turns out to be a criticism of modern democracy itself.  This is the hard lesson: there is no such thing as individualist, rationalist democratic politics.  Political society is made up of alignments among cleavages, ordered by salience which rises and falls according to a kind of political economy of power, and individual political behavior is largely made up of expressions of solidarity with various institutionalized representations of those cleavages⁶.  In short, society, especially political society, really is fundamentally made up of various social groupings including “race, class, gender, sexuality,” and so forth.  It is politically rational, at least in the “rational irrationality” sense of Bryan Caplan, for people to organize on the basis of their commonalities in order to achieve shared political ends.  The myth of the liberal society of individuals is a delusion that doesn’t reflect political reality.  Condemning those of us who study politics as they are, and not as we wish them to be, is absurd.  In this instance, the so-called “woke” are more correct than the mainstream.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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