Review: Left Is Not Woke

  

 

 

 

Susan Neiman's 2023 book Left Is Not Woke presents a perspective broadly in line with my own -- that, as it's put on the book jacket, "[t]he intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress." These Enlightenment convictions were also characteristic of the Sixties counterculture which played a major role in shaping my identity when I became self-aware at the age of eight, as well as of my Old Left parents, thanks to whom I was exposed to that counterculture, particularly when we had friends visit and I sat in and listened to their conversations, as well as through the "underground" papers and comics that sometimes lay around the house.

The genuine left is defined not by a rejection of liberal values but rather, as Neiman says in the introduction, "the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which undergird the real exercise of political rights."

The second chapter, "Universalism and Tribalism," focuses on the first of the principles listed above. Neiman criticizes the term "identitarianism" because "it suggests that our identities can be reduced to two dimensions, at most.... We are all someone's children, a fact that recedes in importance if we are busy raising our own, but you need only step into your parents' home to shift back to the moment when your primary identity was 'child.'" (In some ways it never stopped being central for me, perhaps because I acquired a radical identity while still in that status, so it naturally incorporated in a visceral way my resentment of adultist authoritarianism.) She observes that traditionally, whereas the right "recognized no deep connections... to anyone outside its own circle, the left demanded that the circle encompass the globe.... What united was not blood but conviction... To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false."

The third chapter, "Justice and Power," addresses the second of the above principles. Wokeism is ultimately cynical because it reduces the concept of justice to redressing perceived imbalances of power -- in practice, only between specific recognized demographic groups. It surrenders in advance the idea that we might collectively overcome our division into plural collective subjectivities with antagonistic interests, which presupposes a conception of justice that transcends that division. I think it's not coincidental that class is the category most often overlooked in woke discourse, because it's the only one that's actually defined by inequality, such that the point of organizing around it isn't to raise the status of one group relative to another, but in fact to abolish the distinction between them. This is also why woke discourse, despite its militant and sometimes even "revolutionary" posturing, is so eagerly embraced by many leaders and political representatives of corporate capital: rather than undermining the supremacy of capital over society that keeps us mutually alienated, it simply gives capital a fresher and more "diverse" face through a clientelist process that reinforces our group antagonisms. Marxism, by contrast, aims at the constitution of the working class as a political subject through the overcoming of these divisions, as the first step to abolishing them within society as a whole through the creation of a classless society. Of course, without a positive conception of justice as something transcending the mutual vying for power of rival demographic groups, you can have no durable conception of progress either, which is the subject of  the fourth chapter, "Progress and Doom."

My one major problem with the book pertains to a section of chapter three devoted to portraying evolutionary psychology as a sort of pseudoscientific rationalization for pessimism about the possibility of a better society such as socialism. But it’s really based on a common misconception of what this theory means. For instance, Neiman writes,

“The philosopher Mary Midgley argues that the claim of universal selfishness is incoherent: ‘Had regard for others really been impossible, there could have been no word for failing to have it.’”

Yet this disregards the fact previously acknowledged by Neiman that advocates of this theory say they “are not using the word ‘selfish’ in an ordinary vulgar sense […] but to describe a complex abstract property, the tendency to maximize one’s own gene representation in future generations.” Several of the examples Neiman cites show clearly that this is in fact what they’re talking about, meaning her objection seems to arise solely from a refusal to simply take them at their word about what their own words are meant to convey.

And again: "[E]ven without the help of science and scholarship, a little self-reflection could convince us that we do not always act as the reigning ideologies suggest. We care about asserting truth, not just maintaining power; we often act with regard for others, from interests that are not material interests; and our behavior is rarely guided by the impulse to reproduce as many copies of ourselves (or our images) as possible." Most of us don't even need any reflection to realize these things; we know them intuitively. But none of this is in any way inconsistent with the idea that the reason we have these altruistic impulses is that the genes giving rise to them helped our ancestors to reproduce. And that's fundamentally all that the "selfish gene" thesis means. So the entire criticism presented here amounts to a straw-man argument.

Another example of a self-created problem is where she criticizes, “Any problem in the theory can be explained by saying that what no longer serves our selfish interests once served our hunter-gatherer ancestors.” Yet if she thinks this amounts to a “just so story,” then she logically has to say the same thing about evolutionary theory as a whole, since “held over” traits like this are found in all aspects of the organism, not just behavior. In fact there’s no mystery here, since the time scale on which the environment for a population changes can be orders of magnitude shorter than that on which a trait starts to attenuate because the selective pressure previously favoring it has disappeared.