Editor’s Note: This essay comes to us from Pharnabazus who writes for the substack IMPASSE. You can follow them @impassemagazine. I highly recommend that you check out their work. This essay helps us think through how to bring an ancient analysis of problems into direct contact with the contemporary world. It sets forth part of the disposition required of great books students if they are to become thoughtful men of action.
Two feelings or moods have, to our detriment, settled over life in the modern West. The first is a sense of detachment, especially from our historical and cultural legacies, particularly the ideas and institutions that lie at the heart of our political order. The second is a sense of being overly dependent upon networks of highly regulated, managed, and back-channelled systems. I want to say a word on how these two moods, detachment and dependence, combine to weaken our situational awareness and preemptively neuter our ability to consider alternative possibilities.
“Woke” today (2022) means something like: the normative assumption that most if not all of the important institutions of Western life – commerce, government, law, religion, education, even science and medicine – are irretrievably tainted by a genealogy of injustice and oppression. And for those who participate in this movement, to show that something belongs to this genealogy is enough to “demonstrate” that it ought to be overthrown or substantially reformed.
Now, setting aside the question of its veracity or the quality of its analysis, one of the main effects of Woke activism is to entrench a sense of complacency about genuine critical engagement. For those who are drawn to it, Woke simply affirms that the old need not be taken seriously, that we’ve understood our traditions well enough to know that they are fit only for rejection. And even if there is a legitimate yearning among the activists to shed the debris of history in the spirit of growth or vitality, much of what is cast off is done so blindly, without investigating whether our culture is truly moribund. But without asking precisely this question, Woke will continue to make the profound mistake of confusing the rejection of culture with the liberation from its influence.
In the context of normal America, Woke tends to win precisely because its animating spirit compliments and reinforces normal-man’s indifference. The ordinary Westerner isn’t invested enough to quarrel. If Woke is that confident that the West is wrong; well, I can be that much more confident that I shouldn’t care. And it is in this sense that Woke really does force us to confront a failure in the West. The average normal has a weak mental and spiritual grip on the main currents of the past; he has but the faintest picture of how the origins or founding intentions of Western institutions shape his current experience. This doesn’t mean his life isn’t formed or improved in myriad positive ways by his historical inheritance; but that he doesn’t grasp the right connections well enough to defend them.
Now, whether you sit on the left or the right, you should understand that it is easy to feel like you’re caring about things or doing something when playing along with a ready-made diversion. But instead of joining the complaints against victim group X or political hack Y, ask yourself about things that are closer to home and actually rooted in your experience – in fact, why not start by asking yourself about your home: begin with some basics: what do you know about construction or painting or HVAC systems or your washer and dryer? Who are your neighbors? How old is your neighborhood? Who designed it? Who is your Mayor? Do you understand why your home is priced at its current value? Or how you get electricity? Or how your internet works? Or how your favorite local stores get their supplies? Ask yourself: where in your immediate experience do you get enough real mental traction for actionable intelligence?
If you are like me, you might understand embarrassingly little about these domains. You probably haven’t even noticed how much there is that you don’t know in even the most familiar settings. For the most part, though, it doesn’t matter and it won’t matter. You are content to let these things recede into a mental haze, unless, of course, something breaks down; and then you call in an expert to fix your problem while you eat your incompetence. But this is temporary. Things get back up and running and, instead of being inspired to turn against your ignorance, you comfortably flick back to today’s other, more pressing fights.
Much of our lives are lived in this way: we inhabit structures we don’t understand, don’t really care to understand, all while engaging a drama that seems more real even while, or precisely because, it discourages critical contact with reality at all levels. And because modernity tactfully enables a kind of complacency that minimizes the pains of self-correction, it can go on and on and on without much friction. This is a starting point for what I mean by “detachment.”
Our sense of being dependent also feeds our complacency; we know enough about the complexity of modern life to know that we are beholden to networks, devices, machines we will never understand; but we tolerate the anxiety of blind reliance because the fact that it all seems to work means someone knows what’s going on. Our awareness of our ignorance and our vulnerability tends not, therefore, to be a spur to inquiry.
For the most part, the operational sides of our various systems tend to be functionally efficient. Profits require a working order. Living in a large city, a metro area, in a μεγαπολις, near a refinery or an airport or a major highway system can create this impression: surely someone is in charge of this complexity; surely someone knows what is going on, is watching, is understanding, is somehow in control… This feeling is similar to the vague but alluring epistemic fakery we indulge when talking about the facts, when we use the reassuringly royal scientific “we”: don’t be silly, we now know that Pluto isn’t a planet… Wash your hands! We now know that germs cause disease… that smoking causes cancer… that pollution causes climate change… we now know… thankfully, someone is in charge. It is amazing how much of modern life both confronts us with sharp instances of our ignorance while somehow smoothing them over with a false but powerful confidence in positive fact… that somehow we also share in the awareness of those we presume are in control.
The distractions of activism and the “certainties” of scientific order both contribute to complacency and passivity. Let me illustrate some of this by concluding with an analogy: For many if not most Westerners, even if you own your own business or shop or farm or clinic, life very much feels like you were born into working for a large corporation. You come into the world with the help of highly advanced products, techniques, and devices. As you grow, you exchange your toys and other goods for things more appropriate to your age, but always with the expectation that there will be more new and better stuff ready and waiting to usher you into the future. Visions of material progress help orient your “education”; several incentive streams open up to you; and with enough hard work you can even graduate into management and administration, whether in business, tech, science, education, or policy. For the most part, however, no one has ever really taught you what it is exactly that your corporation does or is supposed to do – except of course for generating more new and better stuff. You do know that, in the past, your company severely misbehaved: the colonial conquest of resources… the dirty mess of industrial production… the mistreatment of labor… But things are much better now! And to keep Western Normal on the right track, your HR division requires monthly, sometimes weekly, “workshops” to update team conscience. Now, maybe you’re the type who is content with these initiatives, even perhaps heartened by them; or maybe you’ve become cynical, and you like to tell off-color jokes in the snack room. Either way, you don’t really understand what it is that you are doing. Sure, you know your specific job or task well enough not to get fired. But you have only the merest sense of the big picture, of how all the parts fit together, where things come from and where they go, what the purpose of all this stuff is… you don’t even know how the company is structured, how it keeps the lights on, or who is really, truly in charge; but things keep moving along… so somebody must be.
But imagine one day you stumble into a little room you’ve not noticed before. In this room are the logs and records of the corporation. You start reading from page one only to discover that the corporation began in the midst of struggle; that there were real competitors, real alternative groups with completely different approaches to making and organizing the goods of life. By investigating this history, you can now better appreciate what your corporation does well and where it has ossified, become dysfunctional or corrupt. You are now in a better position to see what continues to serve its life and your own life, and what truly deserves to be cast off. And even if, through your learning, you come to realize that not much can be done to salvage the corporation as a whole; you learn that others, too, are interested in your new questions and problems; and that you can form a way of life that exists apart from the world of stuff. You learn, ultimately, that whatever is vital in the desire for change must – precisely because of the peculiarities of our world – find its way first through a clearing in awareness; and that this clearing is won initially by seriously engaging the alternative visions of what is most beautiful and good.