This triptych has always bound democratic, non-sectarian leftist movements together at least until the dawn of postmodernism with its “end of metanarrative” credo and its accompanying reduction of every social phenomenon to hidden linguistic meanings which has led to word sectarianism and tyranny perfectly redolent with the regimes of Stalin and Mao. While the arc of history may not currently be bending in the direction of peace or justice, Neiman indicts the woke left’s dereliction of duty in the context of the global growth and connectedness of the populist, nativist, identitarian (woke even?) Right from Budapest to Delhi and to Washington. What unites these ethno-nationalists is less belief in the superiority of their own tribe but belief in the principle of tribalism itself: human beings will only connect with who belong to their particular clan, and need have no deep commitments to anyone else.[2] The antonym for this perversely universalist world view is the “citizens of nowhere” of former UK PM Theresa May’s invention; a far darker version are the deracinated, rootless cosmopolitans of totalitarian (Nazi or Stalinist) demonology. So, can the left really afford the word games and the checking your privilege wars of privilege while the enemy is not just at our gates but on our streets and in our conversations?
Neiman defines woke as beginning with concern for marginalised persons and ends by reducing each to the prism of their marginalisation. What should have been a unifying organisational principle of woke or social justice movements, intersectionality, led to focus on those on the most marginalised aspects of identity, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma. Woke highlights the ways in which particular groups are denied justice and seeks modes of recompense for them. But the focus on inequalities of power often leads to the relegation of the concept of justice. Woke demands that nations and peoples confront their criminal histories. In the process it often claims that all history is criminal.[3]
While the woke movement expresses heartfelt and traditional left-wing sentiments: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed and determination to rectify historical wrongs; these emotions are however derailed by the theoretical assumptions that underpin them. What unites these diverse theories is rejection of the epistemological frameworks and political nostrums inherited from the Enlightenment. The received wisdom of so much woke thought is that since the Enlightenment is a Eurocentric concept and construct and (in that worldview) and so an accompaniment to European colonialism in Africa and Asia; it is a redundant tool for the analysis of the oppression of people of colour and other marginalised groups. It is thus important to reclaim and modify Enlightenment ethics and philosophy for a 21st century left.
Universalism
The idea of universalism was once the essence of being left-wing. International solidarity was its gospel credo which distinguished it from the right, which recognised no deep connections, and few obligations, to anyone outside its own orbit. Whether it was caring about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in the Spanish Civil War; anti-apartheid activists in South Africa or indeed any anti-colonial m not ethnicity or race but conviction and a shared sense of humanity.[4] The Left [5]opposed apartheid less out of explicit support for the majority Black population of South Africa and much more out of a demand for one person, one vote in a new, democratic nation and the dismantling of all the edifices of the apartheid state. It opposed apartheid because the system was built on the principle of human beings being classified and privileged or discriminated on the basis of skin pigmentation (the definition of which could shift in the most grotesque of circumstances as in the case in the denial of entry into South Africa of the English Test cricketer Basil D’Oliveria as he was classified “coloured” and could not play in an all white squad).
Universalism is now under fire on the left because of its conflation with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others under the banner of an abstract humanity that turns out to represent just a dominant culture’s time, place and interests. That happens daily in the name of corporate globalism which tries to convince humanity that lasting human happiness is to be found in a vast universal mall.[6]
The Enlightenment
It is now an article of faith among the woke left that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views that supported colonialism. Neiman indignantly refutes this contention by pointing out that Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism, based on universalist ideas citing as an example Voltaire ‘s novella Candide published in 1759 with its diatribe against fanaticism, slavery, colonial plunder and other European evils which earned its author frequent bans for blasphemy and sedition: a movement that came to flower in 1698 with the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary and ended in 1804 with the death of Immanuel Kant. Her concern is with the ideas of the Enlightenment ‘fundamental for the left’: universalism, justice and the possibility of progress. While accepting that the Enlightenment did not realise all the ideals it championed, Neiman reminds its detractors that they ignore the historical background to its thought. It was an era of waves of incurable plagues, bloody and recurring religious wars, the near genocidal persecution of women as witches and emergence of knowledge of the barbaric atrocities inflicted on the peoples of the New World.
Neiman defines woke as beginning with concern for marginalised persons and ends by reducing each to the prism of their marginalisation. What should have been a unifying organisational principle of woke or social justice movements, intersectionality, led to focus on those on the most marginalised aspects of identity, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma. Woke highlights the ways in which particular groups are denied justice and seeks modes of recompense for them. But the focus on inequalities of power often leads to the relegation of the concept of justice. Woke demands that nations and peoples confront their criminal histories. In the process it often claims that all history is criminal.[3]
While the woke movement expresses heartfelt and traditional left-wing sentiments: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed and determination to rectify historical wrongs; these emotions are however derailed by the theoretical assumptions that underpin them. What unites these diverse theories is rejection of the epistemological frameworks and political nostrums inherited from the Enlightenment. The received wisdom of so much woke thought is that since the Enlightenment is a Eurocentric concept and construct and (in that worldview) and so an accompaniment to European colonialism in Africa and Asia; it is a redundant tool for the analysis of the oppression of people of colour and other marginalised groups. It is thus important to reclaim and modify Enlightenment ethics and philosophy for a 21st century left.
Universalism
The idea of universalism was once the essence of being left-wing. International solidarity was its gospel credo which distinguished it from the right, which recognised no deep connections, and few obligations, to anyone outside its own orbit. Whether it was caring about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in the Spanish Civil War; anti-apartheid activists in South Africa or indeed any anti-colonial m not ethnicity or race but conviction and a shared sense of humanity.[4] The Left [5]opposed apartheid less out of explicit support for the majority Black population of South Africa and much more out of a demand for one person, one vote in a new, democratic nation and the dismantling of all the edifices of the apartheid state. It opposed apartheid because the system was built on the principle of human beings being classified and privileged or discriminated on the basis of skin pigmentation (the definition of which could shift in the most grotesque of circumstances as in the case in the denial of entry into South Africa of the English Test cricketer Basil D’Oliveria as he was classified “coloured” and could not play in an all white squad).
Universalism is now under fire on the left because of its conflation with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others under the banner of an abstract humanity that turns out to represent just a dominant culture’s time, place and interests. That happens daily in the name of corporate globalism which tries to convince humanity that lasting human happiness is to be found in a vast universal mall.[6]
The Enlightenment
It is now an article of faith among the woke left that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views that supported colonialism. Neiman indignantly refutes this contention by pointing out that Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism, based on universalist ideas citing as an example Voltaire ‘s novella Candide published in 1759 with its diatribe against fanaticism, slavery, colonial plunder and other European evils which earned its author frequent bans for blasphemy and sedition: a movement that came to flower in 1698 with the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary and ended in 1804 with the death of Immanuel Kant. Her concern is with the ideas of the Enlightenment ‘fundamental for the left’: universalism, justice and the possibility of progress. While accepting that the Enlightenment did not realise all the ideals it championed, Neiman reminds its detractors that they ignore the historical background to its thought. It was an era of waves of incurable plagues, bloody and recurring religious wars, the near genocidal persecution of women as witches and emergence of knowledge of the barbaric atrocities inflicted on the peoples of the New World.
Into this landscape Enlightenment thinkers introduced the idea of humanity which is its fundamental precept. They insisted that no matter which god human beings worshipped (or not) human beings are endowed with innate dignity. While versions of this belief are to be found in the scriptures of the world’s major religions on the basis that some of us were born in the image of God, Enlightenment thinkers derived it from reason. What then follows from the principle that all human beings have an intrinsic claim on human dignity, is the notion that human rights should be guaranteed to everyone, regardless of cultural background and the history they have lived and experienced.[7]
Rights and Wrongs
Human rights have been an essentially contested concept since the Age of Enlightenment. Jeremy Bentham famously called them nonsense on stilts in 1796. While there is an emotional logic and coherence to them, philosophers have wrestled with and struggled to pin down their ontological status. In this regard Neiman cites the writer Tom Keenan who argues that rights, “especially human rights, are better treated as things we claim rather than things we have...” For to admit that they are only claims “might make them stronger by making them less essentialist, dogmatic sacred or as Michael Ignatieff once put it, idolatrous.” Following Lynn Hunt’s now classic Inventing Human Rights, Keenan argues that the apparently paralysing abstraction of human rights and the absence of a metaphysical basis is a source of their power. “The notion of the “rights of man”, like the revolution itself, opened up an unpredictable discussion for conflict and change.”[8]
Debates about which rights are paramount raged into the 20th century. Are individual rights superior to social rights? Are rights such as those of women to reproductive autonomy enforceable if elective abortion services are not free at the point of use and if there is no universal availability of childcare? Is there a right to work? Do groups rights ever trump individual rights (a battleground often fought out in progressive spaces between universalists and cultural relativists or particularists)?
The power of claims to rights was articulated by Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the two-year committee process that led to the Universal Declaration of Rights, who knowing that it could create no binding obligation hoped that it would “serve as a common standard of achievement for all people of all nations”. That is the standard that the left needs to be seen to uphold. The following preamble to the Universal Declaration, issued by the United Nations should serve as a unifying manifesto:
All human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political rights such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social, and cultural rights, such as the right to work, social security, and education, or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self-determination, inter-related and interdependent. The improvement of one right facilitates the advancement of the others. Likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others.[9]
The Real Eurocentrics
Neiman mines a rich seam of literature and political polemic from the 18th century Enlightenment era and the post-colonial Global South to refute the charge that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. When she endorses the insistence by contemporary ;postcolonial theorists that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they are articulating a narrative that originated with Montesquieu who in his The Persian Letters used fictional Persians to criticise European mores in ways he could not have done as a Frenchman using its own voice. This was followed by Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage which criticised the patriarchal sexual mores which criminalised women who bore children out of wedlock, from the perspectives of the more egalitarian Hirons and Tahitians. Voltaire’s most incisive attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese emperor, and an indigenous South American priest.
In their recent best-seller The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow argue that Enlightenment critiques from the standpoints of non-European observers have usually been read as literary strategies whereby those writers attribute their own thoughts to imagined non-Europeans to avoid certain persecution at home. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the non-European interlocuters were basing their claim on a study of Lanontan’s Dialogue with a Huron published in 1703 which recounted his travels among the Canadian indigenous peoples Algonquin and Wendat acquiring fluency in both languages and his conversations with a Wendat thinker and a statesman named Kandiaronk. Lahontan was taken with the erudition and eloquence of Kandiaronk and attributed much sophisticated political thinking to him. While their evidence is inconclusive, some of their Enlightenment theses are questionable and the historical Kandiaronk was only one of many Indigenous critiques of money, property rights and social hierarchies that had attracted European attention since the 16th century, what is undeniable is that the debates over The Dawn of Everything prove that the Enlightenment was an enabler in the rejection of Eurocentrism and urging Europeans to examine to reflect on themselves and their world view from the perspective of the rest of the world.[10]
Fast forward to the post-colonial canon of the 20th and 21st centuries. For where Europeans adopted the White Man’s Burden in civilising missions for non-European savages, some within the ranks of the white guilt ridden, Noble Savage constituency of the woketariat, reverse the binary by casting non-European, especially indigenous peoples, as the source of all virtues while seeing Europeans bereft of them. Such arguments get short shrift from a variety of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers. Amilcar Cabral, Mozambiquan freedom fighter assassinated by Portuguese colonialists in 1973 cautioned that
… blind acceptance of the values of the (African) culture, without considering what presently or potentially regressive elements it contains, would be no less harmful to Africa than racist underestimation of African culture had been. Thinkers like Sekyi-Out argue that “... ‘; race obstructs our perpetual horizon, distracts us from attending to other, foundational questions of human being and social existence'. [11]
In his defence of the relevance of the Enlightenment project for contemporary Africa, the philosopher Olufemi Taiwo strongly criticises the ‘decolonisation’ imperative of many contemporary social justice warriors. He argues that in the process of their colonisation of Africa, Europeans discarded their own ideals of liberty, self-determination, government by the consent of the governed and even humanity itself. African agency is taken away when the history of Africa is centred on the history of its colonisation which makes that history a narrative of Africa’s invaders.[12]
From the pen of Frantz Fanon, head of the postcolonial canon and a merciless chronicler of European barbarism, comes this rarely quoted aphorism:
All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same object: the human being.
The final sentence of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth reads:
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new humanity.
Otherwise, to reject universalism altogether because it is being abused is to give Europe “the last word of the imperial act.”
This riposte to the cultural relativism of the modern white saviours of the woketariat is an apt conclusion for this plea to put genuine universalism at the front and centre of the democratic, anti-identarian left.
[1] Susan Neiman (2023) Left Is Not Woke. London: Polity Press p.2
[2] Ibid, p.3
[3] Ibid, p.5
[4] Ibid, p.11
[5] Ibid, p.23
[6] Ibid, p.32
[7] Ibid, p.34
[8] Ibid, pp. 34-35
[9] Ibid, pp.35-36
[10] Ibid, pp.36-37
[11] Ibid, pp.50-5
[12] Ibid, p.52
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Another appearingly erudite piece from Barry, but largely, I'd contend, inaccessible to the average reader.
ReplyDeleteSome years ago when putting a presentation together I sought the help of a buddy, a guy who worked as a training manager for a global company, and he pointed out to me that the hard work of writing was 90% editing and rewriting.
Ask yourself Barry 'are you writing to inform or are you just writing for self-gratification'?
Some of your own stuff can be near enough impenetrable or above the heads of most people.
DeleteWriting has to be gratifying for the writer otherwise there would be little motivation to do it if it is just a chore. Barry's writing is very informative and well supported. I didn't find much difficult about this piece even with trying as always to read it through the eye of the average reader.
I am very much a fan of Susan Neiman. She does a good job in pushing back against the woketards who make both Woke and left projects unattractive options for many.