Belmont Club: The Woke God

The writer James Lindsay said in a talk (here available on YouTube) before the European Parliament that 'Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian'. Lindsay, described in Wikipedia as a promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, goes on to describe how 20th-century Marxists, disheartened by the failure of the abolition of economic property to create wealth, expanded their evangelical model to include other types of properties. Race, civilization, and even sexual normalcy were all regarded as oppressive advantages that had to be mocked, abolished, and otherwise scattered for "equity" — the great leveling — to be achieved. This expanded their audience considerably and allowed them to expand beyond the traditional working class.

The James Lindsay talk explains why radical politics and Wokism in particular always involve God, or at least universals, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in the negative sense of militant atheism. That is because it deals with the eternal issues, the nature of humanity, the origin of civilization, and the meaning of social relations. Hence Lindsay's remark that "Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian."

Indirect proof of this assertion can be seen in the traction of the Woke message in historical, parochial, or ethnic contexts where they were alien. Examples include anti-colonial movements in Ireland, which never had a colony; Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Europe and perhaps this most curious of imitations:

“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”

The message is nothing to do with the facts, just the feelings. Will it last? If Marx's thesis, as Lindsay argues, was fundamentally erroneous in the domain of economics, the mistake cannot be fixed by expanding the flawed analysis to explain race, culture, sexuality and history after its original failure. Mistakes just get bigger by expanding their scope. Wokism as enlarged Marxist economics doesn't get better, it gets worse.

Rebranding and cultural packaging will help a bankrupt idea only temporarily. Wokism as a 'Maoist virus with American characteristics' might initially spread in a culture with no initial immunity to it, but it will eventually trigger an immune response because the victim host evolves also. This happens both to viruses in organisms and memes in societies. Like the original flavor Maoist Cultural Revolution, the new improved Critical Theory will run its course and die for exactly the same reasons. But not before wreaking untold havoc on institutions, lives, and countries. China was so big it didn't croak despite the maniacal Mao but smaller countries like Cambodia were nearly done in by millennial fanatics. What damage it will cause the West is yet unknown.

Lindsay correctly identifies "the middle level response" to the "middle level provocation" as a key survival strategy because the immune system must neither be so passive nor react so violently as to kill the host itself. He cites Nazi Germany as an example of a society where the cure to Marx may have been worse than the disease. This ability to generate the learning response, the adaptive strategy is key to avoiding this. One of the encouraging things about the university response to pro-Hamas protesters has been its variety depending on the state, socio-economic composition of the student body, degree of eliteness, etc. of the campus. American society might be much more resilient than it might seem. Subsidiary decision-making is much more effective than a centralized state response. This is not immediately obvious but quite significant.

Circling back to Lindsay's original premise of Marx as a theologian one might ask what is the essence of species Marxism, of which Woke is a genus? If Marxism is a religion what 'God' does it serve? What lies at its core? Given its ability to shape-shift it may take a thousand years to see its true face. The 'Marxian' God may be very ancient, like a Jungian archetype. Marxism could in fact be a misnomer because Karl did not invent this God. If archetype it was there before him. We can only learn to keep such things at bay. Whatever it is we will never be rid of it, unless perhaps there is a Last Day. Albert Camus put it eloquently when he described how even great human victories are only temporary in his novel, The Plague.

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”