0:00

As if the McChrissy

0:02

couldn't get any better, Bacon

0:04

and Ranch just entered the chat.

0:07

The Bacon Ranch McChrissy. Available

0:09

and participating McDonald's for a limited time.

0:12

I'm Nala Iyed, and welcome

0:13

to

0:17

this episode of Ideas, which begins

0:20

with one word,

0:22

woke.

0:30

The term itself has been associated

0:32

with political activism, with

0:34

progressive activism, and

0:37

being engaged and responding

0:40

to inequalities, injustices,

0:42

discrimination, layers of discrimination,

0:45

intersectional discrimination everywhere.

0:49

Woke started off as a way to indicate

0:52

awareness of social injustice. But

0:55

as it gained currency on the left, it

0:57

also became weaponized by the right.

1:01

I think it goes back to this woke mind

1:03

virus that's infected the left

1:05

and all these other institutions.

1:07

This woke self-loathing has swept

1:10

our country. The poisonous lie of equity,

1:12

wokeness, and identity politics. You've

1:16

likely heard of most of this so

1:18

far, but what

1:20

you may not have heard is a critique

1:22

of wokeness from the left. What's

1:25

confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses

1:28

traditional left wing emotions. Empathy

1:32

for the marginalized, indignation at the

1:34

plight of of the oppressed, determination that

1:36

historical

1:36

wrongs should be righted. Those

1:39

emotions, however, are derailed

1:41

by a range of theoretical assumptions that

1:44

ultimately undermine them. This

1:47

is moral philosopher Susan Nieman.

1:49

She's director of the Einstein Forum

1:52

in Potsdam, Germany, and a

1:54

self-described lifelong leftist.

1:56

I was raised in Georgia during the Civil

1:58

Rights Movement and turn left from there. I'm

2:02

happy to be called leftist and socialist.

2:04

Susan

2:06

Neiman argues that what's often called

2:09

wokeism has now become antithetical

2:12

to the left. What concerns

2:14

me most are the ways in which contemporary voices

2:17

considered to be leftist have abandoned

2:19

the philosophical ideas that are central

2:21

to any left-wing standpoint, a

2:23

commitment to universalism over tribalism,

2:26

a firm distinction between justice and power,

2:29

and a belief in the possibility

2:30

of progress. Susan

2:33

Neiman's most recent book is entitled,

2:35

Left is Not Woke. She

2:38

joined me at the Toronto Reference Library

2:40

for an onstage discussion.

2:42

Thank

2:46

you all for being here, and thank you very much

2:48

for coming. It's a pleasure. There

2:51

have been criticisms of the word woke

2:53

for a while now, and almost always they

2:55

come from the political right. But what

2:57

I want to know to begin with is,

3:00

at what point did you realize I absolutely

3:03

must write a book called Left

3:05

is Not Woke? So I'm not sure there was

3:07

a particular day, for about two

3:09

years, I was having pretty

3:12

dis-consulate conversations with

3:15

friends in very different countries

3:18

saying things like, did you see

3:19

this, did you see that, I guess I'm

3:21

not left anymore. And

3:26

my response was more and

3:28

more intensely, no, you are

3:30

left. You've been left

3:32

all your life. I mean, somewhere on the liberal

3:34

left spectrum, depending on

3:36

the person, they're not left.

3:39

And my attempt to figure out exactly

3:41

where the confusion was led

3:44

me to exactly 11 months ago.

3:48

I had been

3:48

invited to give a big lecture at the University of Cambridge,

3:51

and I figured, okay, they can throw tomatoes

3:54

at me. It doesn't matter, I'm going to

3:56

see if I can work out what I think about

3:58

this. And there were no tomatoes? There

4:00

were no tomatoes on the contrary. All

4:02

of these people in their late 20s said,

4:04

gosh, I never heard a critique

4:07

from the left

4:07

before there's something in that.

4:10

I mean, that really surprised me. I expected a

4:12

lot of pushback. And I

4:14

made it clear, as I make clear in the book, I

4:17

don't call myself a liberal. Now, that's partly

4:19

because I

4:20

live in Europe, where liberal just means libertarian.

4:23

But I'm very happy to call myself

4:25

a socialist. There's a proud

4:28

socialist tradition It's not

4:30

necessarily communist or Marxist, but that's where

4:32

I situate myself.

4:36

I was raised in Georgia during the civil rights

4:38

movement and turned left from

4:40

there. At a time

4:42

when even liberal is often a slur in American

4:44

culture, it's easy to forget that

4:46

socialist was once a perfectly respectable

4:49

political position in the land of the

4:51

free. None other

4:53

than Albert Einstein wrote a proud

4:55

defense of socialism at the height of the Cold

4:57

War. Like Einstein

4:59

and so many others, I'm happy to be

5:01

called leftist and socialist. What

5:05

distinguishes the left from the liberal is

5:07

the view that, along with political rights that guarantee

5:09

freedoms to speak, worship,

5:11

travel, and vote as we choose, we

5:13

also have claims to social rights, which

5:16

undergird the real exercise of political

5:18

rights.

5:20

Liberal writers call them benefits, entitlements,

5:23

or safety nets. All these terms

5:25

make things like fair labor practices, education,

5:28

healthcare and housing appear as matters

5:31

of charity rather than justice. I'm

5:34

happy to do a big tent with

5:38

people who are less far to the left.

5:40

If you'd like me to define it... Well, sure.

5:43

Why don't we start there? How would you define the left? So,

5:45

it seems to me that there are three principles that are

5:47

common to everybody who situates themselves

5:50

on the liberal left.

5:51

The first is, we're committed to

5:53

universalism rather than tribalism. The

5:56

second is we're committed to

5:58

a

5:58

hard distinction between... between justice

6:00

and power, even where it's not always

6:03

easy to draw. And thirdly,

6:05

we're committed to the possibility

6:07

of progress, which isn't inevitable,

6:10

but it's possible. Those are principles

6:12

that I would share with anybody who

6:15

calls herself a liberal.

6:17

To be on the left,

6:20

you need to add a commitment

6:22

to the idea of social

6:23

rights. So for

6:25

both liberals and leftists, we have political

6:28

rights to freedom of speech, travel worship,

6:30

etc. For people

6:32

on the left, education,

6:34

healthcare, a whole series of labor

6:37

practices are also rights

6:39

and not benefits. Okay, so that's

6:42

the left. What about the word woke? It has

6:44

been a contested term. It's been valorized,

6:46

demonized, every-other-ized. How

6:49

do you define woke?

6:51

So what's so confusing about

6:53

woke is that it appeals to

6:56

emotions which are common to every

6:59

progressive person, that is, sympathy

7:01

for marginalized people's indignation

7:04

at the oppression of people,

7:07

determination to

7:10

right historical wrongs. All

7:13

of those are emotions

7:16

that I share. Where it gets muddy

7:19

is that

7:20

the woke depend on

7:22

a series of theories

7:25

which actually undercut

7:27

or deny all the three principles that

7:30

I talked about. There's a focus

7:32

on tribalism rather than universalism.

7:35

There's a focus on power

7:37

rather than on justice with a

7:39

skepticism that maybe justice is just

7:41

hype and used to cover

7:44

power

7:44

differentials. And

7:46

while of course, various woke activists

7:49

work towards progress, they

7:51

hold a series of beliefs

7:53

beliefs that actually undermine

7:56

the possibility of progress.

7:57

and I think the person who's most

8:00

responsible for that is Michel

8:02

Foucault. What people take

8:04

from Foucault is the idea that every apparent

8:07

step towards progress is actually a

8:09

subtler form of

8:11

oppression. And it goes along

8:13

with refusing to

8:16

acknowledge that there have

8:18

been instances of progress in

8:20

the past. This is the kind of thing we

8:22

hear all the time, well it looked like

8:24

they were working towards

8:26

universal rights but in fact

8:29

certain people were left out. Yes,

8:31

that's true, but nevertheless,

8:35

you didn't have to stop, say, by

8:37

abolishing slavery all

8:40

over again. That was a step towards

8:42

progress, and now we need to go to work

8:45

to abolish other kinds of discrimination.

8:49

Can work be defined?

8:57

It begins with concern for marginalized

8:59

persons and ends by reducing each

9:01

to the prism of her marginalization.

9:05

The idea of intersectionality might

9:07

have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more

9:09

than one identity. Instead,

9:12

it has led to focus on those parts of

9:14

identities

9:15

that are most marginalized and

9:17

multiplies them into a forest of trauma.

9:21

Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular

9:24

groups have been denied justice and

9:26

seeks to rectify and repair the damage.

9:29

In the focus on inequalities of power, the

9:31

concept of justice is often left

9:33

by the wayside.

9:36

Woke demands that nations and peoples face

9:39

up to their criminal histories.

9:40

In the process,

9:42

it often concludes that all history

9:45

is criminal. What's

9:49

confusing about the Woke Movement is that it expresses

9:51

traditional left-wing emotions. Empathy

9:54

for the marginalized,

9:54

indignation at the plight of the oppressed,

9:57

determination that historical wrongs should

9:59

be wrong.

10:00

those

10:02

emotions, however, are derailed

10:04

by a range of theoretical assumptions that

10:07

ultimately undermine them.

10:10

Some listening to your critique

10:12

of woke might accuse you of

10:14

being anti-woke, of being hostile

10:17

to progressive values, or

10:20

listening to voices that have been marginalized throughout history.

10:23

What's your response to that? Well,

10:26

some of those people are even friends of mine. I had

10:28

at least two friends who said, my

10:30

God, Susan, I agree with your argument, but

10:33

don't use the word woke. Come

10:35

up with something else, otherwise you sound

10:37

like Rhonda Santas or Rishi

10:39

Sunak or whatever.

10:42

But you did use the word. I did. I

10:44

thought about it for a long time. I agonized about

10:46

it. But it still seems to me that woke

10:49

picks something out that we all recognize

10:52

and that needs to be examined even

10:54

if it looks like it's putting you

10:57

in bad company. I

10:59

think even if you don't know

11:01

that this is somebody who

11:03

has

11:04

been very much on the side of writing

11:07

historical wrongs and standing

11:10

with people who've been marginalized, I think

11:12

I make it clear that I'm not Rhonda Santas.

11:22

What would you say, I guess, to

11:24

someone who belongs to

11:26

a group that has been historically marginalized,

11:29

who would say that your argument that

11:31

universalism, which sounds

11:34

ideal, is a luxury they

11:36

can't afford? of all,

11:39

tribalism

11:40

is a luxury they can't afford because

11:44

all marginalized

11:47

peoples, where people who've been impressed in the past,

11:49

need deep solidarity

11:52

with other peoples.

11:53

And

11:55

I say somewhere in the book, I'm not an ally. I

11:58

don't want to be an ally.

12:00

Allies are based on interests.

12:03

The United States and the Soviet Union were allies

12:05

for a short period of time when they

12:07

had a common interest in defeating Nazi Germany.

12:11

As soon as that was over, they

12:13

became enemies. If you don't base

12:15

solidarity

12:16

on deep principles that

12:18

you share, it's not real solidarity.

12:22

So that someone who claims

12:25

their marginalization is

12:27

worse than everybody else's is

12:30

reckoning

12:31

themselves out of the game.

12:33

And I should say, one of the

12:35

things that this book was influenced by is

12:37

the fact that for two years in Berlin,

12:40

I've been

12:40

very active in

12:42

the media and

12:46

in the political world, arguing

12:49

for a universalist conception

12:51

of Judaism. I am

12:53

Jewish and in

12:55

Germany,

12:56

which has focused on its

12:58

crimes against the Jewish people,

13:01

what that has seemed to mean

13:03

is we learned

13:05

that we were perpetrators. We learned

13:07

that the Jews were our victims. And

13:09

we learned that we did the worst

13:12

thing to them that could ever

13:14

be done to anyone. And

13:17

if people say, as other

13:20

left-wing Jewish friends of mine and

13:22

I have said, wait a second.

13:24

We don't want to be seen as the victims

13:27

who or worse than any other

13:29

victim.

13:29

And as a matter of fact, we

13:32

want to focus on crimes

13:34

that the state of Israel is committing

13:37

against the people who it's occupied

13:39

for 56 years. We're called

13:41

anti-Semitic. And so it's quite funny,

13:43

of course, to be Jewish and be called anti-Semitic in

13:45

the German press. But that

13:48

experience very much

13:50

strengthened my

13:52

own sense that

13:55

insisting on one's own marginalization,

13:58

or one's own v- as a

14:00

people is not only

14:03

in principle false, but

14:06

it's politically and pragmatically really

14:09

a dead end. Music

14:14

Identity politics embodies a major shift

14:16

that began in the mid-20th century. The

14:19

subject of history was no longer the hero,

14:21

but the victims. Two world wars

14:24

had undermined the urge to valorize traditional

14:26

forms of heroism. The

14:29

impulse to shift our focus to

14:31

the victims of history began as an act of

14:33

justice. History had been the

14:35

story of the victors, while the victims' voices

14:38

went unheard.

14:40

To turn the tables and insist that the

14:42

victims' stories enter the narrative was

14:45

just part of writing old wrongs. Yet

14:48

something went wrong when we rewrote the place of

14:50

the victim. The injunction

14:53

to remember was once a call to remember heroic

14:55

deeds and ideals. Now

14:57

never forget is a demand to recall

15:00

suffering.

15:01

Yet undergoing suffering isn't a virtue

15:04

at all, and it rarely creates any.

15:07

I'd prefer we return to a model in which your

15:09

claims to authority are focused on what you've done

15:11

to the world, not what the world did

15:13

to you. This wouldn't reduce

15:15

the victim to the ash heap of history. It

15:18

would allow us to honor caring for victims as

15:20

a virtue without suggesting that

15:22

being a victim is one as well. Where

15:28

do you see the excesses of what

15:30

you would call woke as the most pronounced?

15:34

We're not. Every place I go

15:36

I hear another story. Look,

15:38

critical books are not being published.

15:40

Critical plays

15:43

are not being presented or if they're

15:46

presented there being

15:49

rewritten

15:49

in certain ways. The

15:51

idea of cultural appropriation,

15:53

that cultural products belong to

15:56

a member of a particular tribe,

15:59

strikes me as against

16:01

the concept of culture itself,

16:04

another kind of problem can

16:06

be seen, and I'm not

16:08

current

16:08

on what exact what issues are

16:10

going on in Canada, so I don't

16:13

know how this is being dealt with here. In

16:15

the US we've

16:17

had for the last three or four years a discussion

16:20

about monuments. I'm extremely

16:22

glad that people have

16:24

taken down monuments to Confederate generals.

16:28

I'm happy for them to go into to

16:30

museums. There's an interesting museum in

16:32

Berlin where they sort of put all the

16:34

bad statues. And they've

16:36

taken them off pedestals

16:39

so that people can climb on

16:41

them and do things with them. I think that

16:43

would be a great thing to do. That discussion

16:45

has definitely also happened in Canada. Right.

16:48

But what we've also had in the United States

16:51

is people asking to take

16:54

down statues of Abraham

16:56

Lincoln. I get quite angry

16:58

about that. Now, was

17:00

Abraham Lincoln, did he say things

17:03

that we today would consider

17:03

racist? Sure. What

17:06

I don't understand is why we

17:09

can't see that as

17:11

an instance of progress, why

17:14

we can't be glad that

17:16

we have made progress in the

17:20

160-some years since Abraham

17:23

Lincoln was assassinated. But

17:25

if we made progress, we

17:27

made it on the back of people like Abraham

17:30

Lincoln who gave his life

17:32

for civil rights for African Americans.

17:38

The history wars are not about heritage, but

17:41

about values. They are not arguments

17:43

about who we were, but who we want

17:45

to be.

17:49

Current debates over monuments focus attention

17:51

on the question of whose statues should fall,

17:53

But we need to think about the question of who should replace

17:56

them.

17:57

need

18:00

to be righted and that perhaps taking statues

18:03

down is part of the process. I

18:06

think some statues should be taken down. What

18:09

disturbs me is the way

18:11

that it's often done without serious

18:14

thought or nuance. My hope

18:17

when the wave of statue overturning

18:21

began

18:22

was that this would be an occasion

18:24

for a serious community discussion

18:27

where people would, first of all, talk about what

18:29

should be taken down, and even more

18:31

importantly, talk about who

18:33

should replace the people who

18:35

have been taken down. Because that's an important question.

18:38

You talk about that in your book. I was going to ask you, if you had

18:40

a magic wand, who would you put up a statue for?

18:43

Paul Robeson is one of my heroes. Somebody

18:47

whose statue I'd be happy to see all over the place.

18:50

I mean, a whole bunch of people, depending on where

18:52

the place

18:53

is, I think it's nice if there could be

18:56

community-based statues.

18:59

I quote Bryan Stevenson,

19:01

who's also one of my heroes, founder

19:04

of the Equal Justice Initiative

19:07

in Alabama, an

19:09

anti-death penalty

19:10

program, and perhaps most

19:12

importantly, founder of the National

19:15

Lynching Memorial.

19:16

And I interviewed him for my

19:18

last book. And one of the

19:20

things he said to me really stuck, He said there

19:22

were white people in the South

19:24

who worked against

19:27

slavery and you don't know their names. And

19:30

there were white people who protested

19:32

lynching and you don't know their names. And

19:35

if we remembered their names, we could

19:38

build an alternative history of

19:39

the South, a history, a narrative

19:42

devoted to people who were brave

19:44

and courageous and went against convention

19:46

and stood up for the right thing.

19:48

So there are plenty of unnamed people.

19:51

I mean, Paul Reppson just occurred to

19:53

me off the top of my head, but there are plenty of others.

19:56

say those people, whether

19:58

they're famous or not, in

20:01

every community, and my guess is that almost

20:03

every community had them, who embodied

20:07

the ideals that we would like

20:09

our communities to uphold.

20:12

Back to the term woke. We're gonna keep

20:15

coming back to the word joke. It was preceded

20:17

years earlier by politically correct,

20:19

and for that, you know, almost forgotten

20:22

now is ideologically sound.

20:24

These terms start kind of on the

20:26

left as legitimate notions

20:29

and they kind of migrate and they make

20:31

their way somehow to the right and

20:33

then they get weaponized and used

20:36

against the left. What is it that accounts

20:38

for that movement do you think? It's a really good question

20:40

because

20:41

I used to be furious about the

20:43

term politically correct, which by

20:45

the way, I mean there may have been real Stalinists

20:47

who used it but I don't really know any Stalinists,

20:50

it was used on

20:53

the non-Stalinist left. Ironically,

20:57

if they felt that somebody was being too Stalinist,

20:59

too rigid, too ideologically

21:02

pure, you would say, oh,

21:05

she's so politically correct. That

21:07

was a left criticism of

21:09

overly rigid leftists. And

21:11

then suddenly it became used by

21:14

the right. Why? It's

21:17

a good question that I don't have an answer to, because

21:19

four years ago or so, I sitting

21:22

with a group of pretty left-leaning

21:25

people. We were talking about the fact that we liked the

21:27

word woke, that we

21:29

were looking for a word that expressed

21:32

a kind of excitement about

21:35

a political activist project, and

21:37

it seemed like

21:38

woke would fulfill

21:40

it. I assume

21:42

that it gets taken up

21:44

by the right simply as as

21:47

a way to smear

21:48

any left wing

21:50

project. That's certainly how it's being used

21:52

today. You make it clear in the

21:54

book that the words you use are, I will

21:56

not see the left, I think is what you say.

21:59

Is there a- Do you ever imagine these

22:01

kinds of terms ever being reclaimable?

22:05

I mean, I don't see it's happening to politically

22:07

correct because the irony got lost

22:09

very quickly.

22:11

And I'm not sure that I can see it happening

22:13

with woke either. I'd

22:16

prefer to go back to the good old

22:19

term left. It's

22:22

something that I think we should be

22:24

not afraid to claim.

22:30

What concerns me most are the ways in which contemporary

22:33

voices considered to be leftist have

22:35

abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central

22:38

to any left-wing standpoint.

22:41

A commitment to universalism over tribalism,

22:44

a firm distinction between justice and power, power

22:46

and a belief in the possibility of progress.

22:51

This has led a number of friends in several countries

22:54

to conclude, morosely, that they

22:56

no longer belong to the Left.

22:59

Despite lifetimes of commitment to social

23:01

justice,

23:02

they're estranged by developments on what's

23:04

called the Woke Left, or the Far Left, or

23:06

the Radical Left. I'm unwilling

23:08

to cede the word left or accept

23:11

the binary suggestion that those who aren't woke

23:13

must be reactionary.

23:18

One of our colleagues at IDEA's, Nahid Mustafa,

23:20

came up with this observation a few years

23:23

ago. It's this. There's a mirroring

23:25

of sorts going on here that

23:27

the left police's language, the

23:30

way the right police's values.

23:34

Why is the left apparently

23:36

or seemingly fixated on language?

23:41

Look, I'm going to say something that may upset

23:43

people in the audience. I think it's

23:45

easier to change language than

23:48

it is to change realities.

23:49

I really do

23:51

care about exact language. I

23:54

think it's important. It's a reflection of thought. But

23:58

here's an example. that I use

24:00

in the book, I'm aware of

24:04

the dangers of ideologies

24:06

in one form

24:08

of progressive language. So here's

24:11

the thing.

24:13

If I called you an

24:15

authoress, okay,

24:19

or a journalistess,

24:22

right? I've been

24:24

called worse than that. Yeah,

24:26

yeah, but I think you'd be offended And if somebody called

24:29

me a philosopher,

24:31

I would have a problem with that.

24:33

German feminists see

24:35

it exactly opposite.

24:38

And if I don't call myself a philosopher

24:40

or a writer, or

24:42

all of those kinds of things, I'm

24:45

offending

24:46

against gender correct

24:48

language. in

24:51

more than one country, as you'll probably

24:53

agree, is a

24:56

good way of getting a distance

24:59

from certain kinds of rigid ideologies

25:03

and realizing, yes, language

25:05

is important, but it's

25:08

not baked into

25:10

the language that

25:13

what one group of people have decided now

25:15

is progressive speak is

25:18

the only way to go. James

25:21

Baldwin wrote, I am not your Negro.

25:24

That was all right. I

25:27

have a friend whose students

25:29

went to the Dean to complain that

25:31

he

25:32

used the word when

25:34

talking about Baldwin.

25:36

Okay, so it's very

25:39

very easy to get

25:42

enraged and upset about

25:45

those kinds linguistic problems,

25:48

it's much harder to make real systemic

25:50

change. You addressed

25:52

some of this in your book, and of course there are words

25:54

that are incredibly difficult

25:57

for people to hear and there are reasons why we don't say

25:59

them. But

26:00

you talk about the way that utterances that

26:02

are judged to be offensive of

26:04

all stripe sometimes become irredeemable

26:07

and even career-enders. What

26:09

do you think accounts for this

26:11

kind of hardline attitude towards

26:13

a verbal transgression no

26:16

matter where it sits kind of on the spectrum?

26:19

I mean, once again, it's a soft

26:21

target. It's

26:22

very, very easy to shoot

26:25

somebody down for

26:28

speaking against a prescribed

26:31

language rule, okay? Something

26:33

that's been determined to be a language

26:35

rule. And of course we'd like to

26:38

have those kinds of rules

26:39

that would make our lives easier. They

26:41

don't work. But

26:43

reacting in that way, I suppose,

26:46

makes people feel like they're

26:48

on the side of the angels

26:50

and they don't have to do much more.

27:00

You're listening to Ideas were

27:03

heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada,

27:05

across North America, on Sirius XM,

27:08

in Australia, on ABC Radio National

27:11

and around the world at cbc.ca

27:14

slash ideas. You can also

27:16

find us on the CBC Listen app or

27:18

wherever you get your podcasts. I'm

27:20

Nala Aied.

27:26

I'm speaking to you at a moment of grave

27:29

crisis. I'm

27:31

Geoff Turner and this is Recall.

27:34

It's a series about history, not

27:36

the ancient past, but history that's

27:39

still hot to the touch. In

27:41

this first season, I explore a revolutionary

27:43

political movement that brought a modern democracy

27:46

to the brink. You can find

27:48

Recall how to start a revolution

27:50

on the CBC Listen app or wherever

27:53

you get your podcasts.

27:56

We

27:56

were looking for a word that

27:59

expressed

28:00

a kind of excitement about

28:03

a political activist project, and

28:05

it seemed like woke would fulfill

28:08

it.

28:11

The term woke has become

28:14

so ubiquitous and contested that

28:16

getting a fix on its real meaning can be elusive.

28:21

It began on the left to

28:23

mean being aware of racial and social

28:25

injustice, but was later seized

28:27

by the right as a pejorative pejorative to

28:30

indicate moralizing zealotry.

28:33

Way to smear

28:35

any left wing project. That's

28:38

certainly how it's being used today.

28:39

But left wing philosopher Susan

28:41

Neiman believes the term does

28:44

demand scrutiny. It still seems

28:46

to me that woke picks something out

28:48

that we all recognize and

28:50

that needs to be examined even

28:53

if it looks like it's putting you

28:55

in bad company. For

28:58

Susan Neiman, that examination

29:00

begins counterintuitively for

29:02

some on the left with the Enlightenment.

29:04

The best tenets

29:06

of WOC, like the insistence on viewing

29:09

the world from more than one geographical perspective,

29:11

come straight from the Enlightenment.

29:16

But for many left-wing thinkers,

29:19

the Enlightenment is synonymous

29:21

with the blood-stained era of colonialism.

29:25

Susan Neiman counters that central

29:27

figures of the Enlightenment opposed

29:29

colonialism, even if their impact

29:32

was limited.

29:34

The Enlightenment critique of colonialism

29:36

did not stop colonialism.

29:40

What it did do was

29:42

to give colonialists a bad conscience. Susan

29:46

Neiman is the author of Left

29:48

is Not Woke. I spoke with

29:50

her on stage at the Toronto Public Library

29:53

as part of the Provocations Ideas

29:56

Festival.

30:00

In many ways the book that you've written is

30:03

a very spirited defense of

30:05

the Enlightenment. It is. I wanted

30:07

to talk a little bit about that. As

30:09

you acknowledge though in your critique

30:12

and in your defense that

30:14

the Enlightenment was the age of empire,

30:16

the age of colonialism, the age of expansionism,

30:19

and it's been criticized as kind of being a justification

30:22

or camouflage for both. Do you

30:24

see any validity in those

30:26

claims?

30:28

I spent a lot of time trying

30:30

to figure out how those claims arose

30:33

because when I first heard them I thought they

30:35

were ridiculous. First of all, the real age

30:37

of empire starts after the Enlightenment,

30:39

starts in the 19th century, but let's

30:41

even leave that aside. There was some

30:44

colonialism during the Enlightenment. I

30:48

found it hard to take seriously because I

30:50

know these works. No one wrote stronger

30:53

attacks on colonialism than

30:55

Enlightenment thinkers. Peter Rose

30:56

says at one point, as if

30:59

he were speaking to indigenous South

31:01

Africans, you know, let fly

31:03

your poisoned arrows. Don't

31:05

believe the Dutch. Let not one stay

31:08

alive to tell the tale. I

31:10

knew that Kant was congratulating

31:13

the Chinese and the Japanese for not

31:15

allowing European

31:16

so-called

31:19

traitors to enter their territory.

31:22

I was

31:22

trying to figure out how

31:25

anybody could get things so

31:27

backward. The other thing

31:29

that's claimed before that is that the Enlightenment

31:31

is Eurocentric. Eurocentrism

31:34

is an idea that was invented by the Enlightenment.

31:37

It was the Enlightenment that urged

31:40

Europeans to look at themselves

31:42

from the perspective of non-Europeans and

31:45

to

31:45

learn from them. they

31:48

used non-Europeans to criticize

31:51

European values, European customs,

31:54

European politics, European sexual

31:56

mores. The Enlightenment

31:59

critique... of colonialism did not

32:01

stop colonialism, okay?

32:04

It went on after the

32:07

great thinkers of the Enlightenment were

32:09

dead. What

32:12

it did do was

32:14

to give colonialists a bad conscience.

32:17

And if you look a little bit at the history of

32:19

colonialism before the 18th

32:21

century, it was self-evident

32:25

that big countries preyed on smaller

32:27

countries. That's just what everybody all

32:30

over the world, whether it

32:31

was the Aztecs or the Malians or

32:34

the Chinese or the Mughals. No

32:36

one questioned the idea that

32:40

big countries should swallow up

32:42

or make territorial inroads

32:44

into or take tribute

32:47

from other countries.

32:48

It was just the way the

32:50

world was. It

32:52

was the Enlightenment that says, this

32:55

is wrong, this shouldn't happen. And

32:59

they gave the 19th century

33:01

a bad conscience, because

33:03

of course the 19th century could see perfectly

33:05

well, colonialism was violating

33:08

human rights that European

33:10

countries wanted for themselves. So

33:13

they use enlightenment

33:15

ideas

33:16

to cover up colonialism. So

33:20

they say things like, well, we're

33:22

not just coming

33:24

to your land and taking

33:26

your treasure because we're bigger than you

33:28

and have better guns, we're going

33:30

to help you become more modern.

33:34

It's a scam.

33:35

It's a terrible scam, but you cannot

33:37

blame it on the Enlightenment itself.

33:40

So now why does this matter, except

33:43

as a question of

33:43

historical justice? I mean, I think historical justice

33:46

is a good thing and we should give credit where

33:49

good ideas deserve credit.

33:51

It's important because if

33:53

you throw out the Enlightenment as

33:55

only an agent of empire.

33:57

You throw out a lot

33:59

of good stuff. things

34:00

that go along with enlightenment.

34:02

You know,

34:03

in particular, the idea that reason

34:05

is not just an agent of power,

34:07

but something that's worth hanging

34:10

onto and perfecting. And then all

34:13

the other principles that I talked about, the ideas

34:15

of universalism. I think it's

34:17

really important to distinguish

34:20

between the fact that the

34:22

enlightenment had, by and large, extremely

34:25

good ideas, extremely anti-racist

34:28

ideas, that like many

34:32

left-wing intellectuals time

34:34

and again didn't succeed in establishing

34:37

themselves. They, by the way,

34:38

they were pretty sexist. I can't

34:41

defend them on everything. But given that the Enlightenment

34:43

has been conflated and mixed up with

34:45

the idea of colonialism and empire, and

34:48

I would argue, and I think a lot of people would, at

34:50

least not misguidedly because

34:52

of the timing everything happened and

34:54

because of the history that we know,

34:57

if you are a PR agent, And how would you untangle

34:59

that history? I mean, where would you begin

35:01

and try to recast? What I do wrong

35:03

just now, because that's what I was trying to do. I was

35:06

trying to say

35:09

they started out as

35:12

absolute anti-colonialists,

35:15

anti-eurocentric, mostly

35:17

anti-racist. Once again, just like

35:20

with

35:20

Abraham Lincoln, you can find racist

35:22

remarks. But if you look at their

35:24

actual

35:25

work and don't

35:28

cherry pick a couple of quotes, you'll

35:30

see this is a deeply progressive

35:33

anti-racist movement. Then

35:35

you say, well, did they succeed only

35:37

partly? There

35:38

was a lot of treasure to be had, and

35:40

people ignored the criticism.

35:45

But they also felt guilty enough

35:48

to take over and twist some

35:49

of the theory.

35:56

It's clear the Enlightenment did not realize all

35:58

the ideals it championed, but that's what I did.

36:02

Some of the criticism's voice today could

36:04

have strengthened the Enlightenment by

36:06

showing that through the restless self-critique

36:09

it invented, it had the power to right

36:11

most of its own wrongs.

36:14

Instead,

36:15

those who might have realized the Enlightenment have

36:17

been engaged in attacking it. Enlightenment

36:20

thinkers

36:20

insisted that everyone, whether Christian or Confucian,

36:23

Parisian or Persian, is endowed

36:25

with innate dignity that demands respect.

36:28

back to the idea

36:30

of reclamation. If you're trying

36:32

to reclaim what is good, as you

36:34

say, of the Enlightenment, where do you begin?

36:36

Where's the starting point? So the starting

36:39

point is taking a look at what the world was like

36:41

before

36:41

the Enlightenment, and to

36:44

appreciate what

36:46

it is that they gave us. Start

36:48

backwards, if you like. 17th, early 18th

36:51

century. If the world was going to get better,

36:54

we'd have to wait for the Messiah to come, or

36:56

we'd have to wait to die, and then if we were lucky,

36:58

we would go to heaven. The idea that

37:02

people

37:02

working together could actually

37:04

make changes in

37:07

improving human dignity and human

37:09

freedom was a brand new

37:11

idea. So by the way, was

37:13

the pursuit of happiness. I mean, happiness was something

37:16

that either we lost in the Garden

37:18

of Eden or some other Golden

37:20

Age or something we

37:22

would get when we would die. The

37:24

idea that people honor us, how

37:27

to right to happiness

37:28

is brand new. Start

37:32

there. Start with the idea that each

37:35

of us is endowed with human reason

37:38

that allows us to question

37:41

what's natural. And

37:44

then think about what was natural at the beginning

37:46

of the 18th century. Feudal

37:49

hierarchies, slavery, the oppression

37:51

of women, most forms of illness. All

37:54

of those things were taken,

37:56

in fact, in parts of the world, well into the

37:58

19th century. as that's

38:00

just nature. So the

38:02

idea that we can use human

38:05

reason to ask whether some

38:07

tradition that we've been told by

38:09

some

38:09

authority or some religious thinker is

38:12

God's will or part of the way the world

38:14

is, that's an enlightenment idea.

38:19

Many of the theoretical assumptions that support

38:21

the most admirable impulses of the woke come

38:23

from the intellectual movement they despise.

38:28

The best tenets of Woke, like the insistence

38:30

on viewing

38:31

the world from more than one geographical perspective,

38:34

come straight from the Enlightenment.

38:37

But contemporary rejections of the Enlightenment usually

38:40

go hand in hand without much knowledge of it.

38:42

You cannot hope to make progress by sawing

38:45

at the branch you don't know you are sitting

38:47

on.

38:49

Let's go back to Foucault. You spend

38:51

a great deal of time talking about him and

38:53

rejecting his way of thinking or his You

38:57

sort of regret his impact. I'm just

38:59

wondering what it is that you find most

39:01

objectionable

39:02

about what Foucault had to say. So

39:05

again, Foucault is, you could call

39:08

him the grandfather of Woke,

39:10

if you like, and he's the most

39:12

quoted thinker in

39:15

post-colonial theory. And

39:17

again, what's confusing about Foucault

39:20

is he has this very transgressive

39:22

aura and being

39:25

openly gay at a time when people

39:27

weren't even beginning to imagine

39:29

marriage equality was part

39:31

of that.

39:33

But it wasn't all of it. He came

39:36

on like someone who

39:38

is inured

39:40

to convention, is ready to turn

39:42

everything over. But

39:45

he is somebody who flouts or

39:47

simply rejects all three

39:50

of the principles that I think are central.

39:53

First

39:53

of all, he's not exactly tribal,

39:55

but he says at a certain point, certain but the

39:57

human was an invention of the 18th century.

40:00

And that's true, except

40:02

it was a good thing. That is,

40:05

it was a good thing when people

40:07

began to start thinking

40:10

of themselves as part

40:12

of a large,

40:13

you know, a much larger

40:15

group than their family or

40:17

their tribe, and thinking

40:19

of things that they had in

40:21

common, and acknowledging

40:24

the dignity in other

40:27

beings who looked very

40:28

different from them, perhaps behave

40:30

very differently from them. So he's

40:32

not wrong to say that it's a constructed concept,

40:35

but I think we should look at it as an achievement.

40:41

Human rights are claims meant to curb

40:43

naked assertions of power. They

40:45

insist that power is not merely the privilege

40:47

of the strongest person in the neighborhood, it

40:50

demands justification.

40:54

Remember the history in which claims to human

40:56

rights arose. It

40:58

was unthinkable that peasants and princes could

41:00

stand anywhere on anything resembling

41:03

equal footing. If the peasant

41:05

took the prince's deer, he could be hanged.

41:08

If the prince took the peasant's daughter, that

41:10

was just the way the world was.

41:14

Universalist claims of justice, meant to

41:16

restrain simple assertions of power, were

41:19

often abused from the American and French

41:21

revolutions that first proclaimed them to

41:23

the present day. think of the war in

41:25

Iraq.

41:28

You may think that power grabs are the best we

41:30

can do. Or you may go

41:32

to work to narrow the gap between ideals

41:34

of justice and realities of power.

41:39

There's

41:39

a terrific television

41:42

debate from about 1970

41:45

between Foucault and Chomsky. On

41:49

Dutch television you can get it on YouTube.

41:51

on YouTube, it's still floating around

41:53

there. And that's

41:56

a point where he says, you know,

41:59

just. Justice is basically

42:01

a sham, all there are

42:03

are power relations. Yes,

42:06

I want there to be a world revolution, but

42:09

only because I want my people

42:11

to be in power and... Incredibly pessimistic.

42:14

Totally pessimistic. I mean, just

42:16

any claim

42:17

to be working towards justice

42:21

is simply trying to pull the

42:23

wool over people's eyes whom you want to

42:25

oppress. And then finally, his view

42:27

about progress is something that

42:29

I think has been incredibly

42:31

influential. Probably

42:33

his most widely read

42:36

book is

42:36

called Discipline and Punish, and

42:38

it begins with the graphic

42:41

description of the horrible

42:44

drawing and quartering

42:46

of someone who tried to assassinate

42:48

King Louis XV. Everyone

42:51

remembers that passage. people

42:54

don't remember anything else from the

42:56

book. And

42:59

it's used as part

43:01

of an argument to say,

43:03

well, this sounds horrible. And

43:06

of course, we're all going to react very

43:09

fascinated, but also nauseated

43:11

by it. But he then

43:13

goes on to give his readers

43:16

the impression that actually

43:19

reforms, prison reforms,

43:22

were actually much more

43:24

insidious, much more sinister, and much

43:26

more dominating

43:28

than old-fashioned drawing

43:30

and quartering. And therefore,

43:33

Coe gets very slippery. If

43:35

you try to say, wait a sec,

43:37

are you really saying that being in prison

43:40

is worse than being drawn and

43:42

quartered? his response would always

43:44

be, what a vulgar question, you

43:46

know? No, I'm

43:49

not going to, you know, say

43:51

something is better or worse. But

43:53

in fact, the impression that he leaves

43:56

people with is better

43:59

not try to do it. any prison reform

44:02

because you'll only wind up making things

44:04

worse. Mutatas, mutandas for the same,

44:06

you know, for a host of other reforms.

44:09

But let's say that Foucault and others,

44:11

like-minded, are as pessimistic as

44:13

you say they are.

44:15

But let's just look around, like just at

44:17

the way things are, the way things were then and the

44:19

way nobody's getting drawn and quartered now. But

44:22

there are a lot of things to be pessimistic about.

44:25

wealth is concentrated into fewer fewer

44:27

hands. That

44:29

concentration means unprecedented power.

44:31

Corporations have more power than

44:34

ever. Political systems are

44:36

essentially falling apart just about everywhere

44:39

you look. So isn't pessimism kind

44:41

of a reasonable reaction to what we

44:44

see around us?

44:45

So I

44:47

should make very clear that I'm not

44:49

an optimist.

44:50

Good thing

44:52

we're clear on that. Yeah. You

44:55

know, I think optimism in the face

44:57

of all of the things you just

44:59

mentioned, plus the climate catastrophe,

45:01

which you did mention. I mean, the list is long, isn't it? Oh,

45:03

rising fascism all over the world. You

45:06

know, I think

45:07

optimism would be obscene. But

45:11

here's the thing, optimism

45:14

and pessimism are claims

45:16

about how the world is going to be.

45:19

And I don't make those claims. I

45:21

don't have access to how

45:23

the world is going to be. What

45:26

I do instead

45:28

is follow Immanuel

45:30

Kant, but also

45:33

it turns out Noam Chomsky makes the same argument.

45:35

He didn't know it was from Kant, but doesn't

45:38

matter. It's

45:38

a true argument. If

45:41

we are

45:42

pessimistic or despair,

45:44

the world really will

45:46

go to hell, okay? There's no question

45:48

about it. If people who are concerned

45:51

about all the things you mentioned and all the other

45:53

things we could mention believe

45:55

that it is possible to stop

45:57

the disaster,

45:58

We have a chance of doing

47:58

hood

48:00

is Benjamin Netanyahu. That is exactly

48:04

what he has done and how he has stayed

48:06

in power, you

48:07

know, insisting that

48:09

first of all because we were victims

48:11

we can do whatever we want and anybody

48:14

who denies that is simply

48:17

contributing to our victimhood by being anti-Semitic

48:20

and secondly by

48:22

insisting that there

48:25

are no real deep connections

48:28

between people who don't have the same

48:30

ethnic

48:30

background. Obviously,

48:33

my guess is that anybody

48:36

who could be called woke

48:38

is not going to explicitly

48:41

support

48:42

the government of Israel in any way, shape, or

48:44

form. And I

48:45

hope that the analogy opens some people's

48:48

eyes because that's where it leads. It's

48:50

the same principle. In your mind, what

48:52

would a progressive flag

48:54

waving nationalism look like?

48:57

Flags. Do

49:00

we have to wave flags? I

49:03

mean, I was just

49:06

thinking of a friend who has around

49:07

her house about 40 different

49:09

flags from different countries. Why not? That

49:12

one could do, perhaps. I

49:14

would be nervous about

49:16

anybody waving a single flag. Why?

49:22

Because it's focusing

49:24

on one part of your identity,

49:26

I mean one of the problems that I have with

49:29

identity politics is it's

49:32

the suggestion that we all

49:34

have one or at best two

49:37

identities. And that's so

49:39

false. We all know that. And

49:41

interestingly enough, it's focusing

49:44

on those parts of our identities

49:47

that we have no control over. And so

49:49

I think one can be proud

49:53

of one's culture at home

49:56

in certain ways in one's culture, But

49:58

I guess I also think it's.

50:00

It's crucial

50:03

not only for understanding other people,

50:05

but to understand your own culture, to

50:08

immerse yourself in somebody else's. And

50:10

I would say probably in two other cultures,

50:13

actually, because if you only do it with one, you

50:16

sort of seesaw back and forth. It's

50:19

important

50:19

to get a sense both of

50:22

difference from the other, but

50:24

also, of course, commonality. What

50:26

do I share with somebody

50:29

who comes from

50:29

a very different world than I do. But

50:32

also, what are my cultural assumptions

50:34

that I'm not aware of? Because if you only live

50:36

in one culture, you think the whole

50:38

world is like that. And that's a

50:41

silly and dangerous position. I guess,

50:43

yeah, I can't see any flags. I

50:46

don't know. But people want

50:48

to be proud, I suppose, let's say,

50:50

if the counter-argument would be, people

50:52

want to be proud. And that kind of realm has

50:54

been ceded to

50:55

the right. Once

50:58

again, this goes back to the monuments question.

51:01

I think in every culture,

51:04

there are traditions to be proud of,

51:06

people who held certain

51:09

ideals, and I think it's absolutely

51:11

right to remember those people. So

51:14

I do think it's important to

51:16

have people to look towards, to be inspired by,

51:18

and to be proud of. I

51:21

just don't know why that has to take the

51:23

shape of a flag. You

51:28

know what? Music.

51:30

I mean maybe music can be turned into sort

51:32

of, you know, right-wing nationalism too,

51:34

I suppose. Everything can be abused. I

51:37

wonder if we could

51:38

sort of meet on saying, you know,

51:42

it's wonderful for people to have songs

51:44

of a particular culture that thrill

51:47

them and move them and to cherish

51:49

those songs without waving

51:52

them. I don't know. One other

51:54

quick question before we go. Is a question

51:56

actually you pose in the book yourself. say

52:00

at a moment when anti-democratic

52:02

nationalist movements are rising on every

52:04

continent, don't we have more

52:06

immediate problems than getting the

52:08

theory right?

52:10

So let me ask you that same question. Don't

52:13

we have more immediate problems? No. I

52:16

worried about that initially. And

52:18

then I began to see two things.

52:22

One is the

52:23

sectarianism of

52:25

the left, and I use the phrase the narcissism

52:28

of small differences. It's extremely

52:31

disturbing that these

52:34

right-wing nationalists

52:37

managed to agree on principles of

52:39

tribalism and work together,

52:42

whereas

52:42

people on the left

52:45

tend to separate

52:47

into smaller and smaller

52:48

groups. And what

52:51

I also realized, and I did ask myself

52:53

that question, as I was writing

52:55

this, I see, first of all,

52:58

people in the

52:58

middle, people who are

53:00

put off by woke as men are moving to the right.

53:03

That's happening all over the place. And

53:07

then you have a kind of the silent

53:08

progressive majority who

53:12

are really disturbed and

53:15

don't feel they have a political home,

53:18

don't feel

53:20

moved towards any kind

53:22

of effective action because

53:24

they don't agree with

53:26

certain woke tendencies. They

53:29

don't want to criticize them because they're worried

53:31

about being put in a camp with

53:33

Rishi Sunak or whoever, but

53:36

they're sort of staying on the sidelines

53:39

until things calm down. So

53:42

yes, I

53:43

do think getting the theory right

53:45

turns out to be important. Thank

53:48

you very much for taking our

53:51

questions, for being here tonight. Thank

53:53

you for great questions.

53:54

I really appreciate it. Thank

53:57

you.

54:05

My conversation with philosopher Susan

54:07

Nieman about her book, Left is

54:10

Not Woke, was recorded on stage

54:12

at the Toronto Reference Library

54:14

as part of their series On Civil

54:17

Society and the 2023

54:19

Provocation Ideas Festival. This

54:22

episode was produced by Greg Kelly

54:25

and Annie Bender. production

54:28

Danielle Duval and Austin Pomeroy

54:30

with additional help from Will Yarr.

54:33

The web producer of Ideas is Lisa

54:36

Aiyousso. Nicola Luxshich

54:38

is the senior producer.

54:40

The executive producer of Ideas

54:42

is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala

54:45

Iyad.