By Jurek Molnar   Not progress, but the “belief” in progress, or the “idea” of progress as a social or historical phenomenon, is a major theme for the present-day student of society. Leo Strauss, Progress or Return? L’aria è diventata irrespirabile E qui regna solo l’indifferenza (The air becomes unbreathable and only indifference reigns here.) Adriano Celentano, L’Uomo Perfetto   1. In order to define a term, we must agree on certain presumptions. For instance we must all agree, that the term is an actual word that is commonly used and has a certain meaning. And we also have to agree  that the word refers to a real thing that exists somehow to some degree in the physical world. No discussion is needed if all observers identify a chair by a reference with the same name, but if someone calls a pipe, a map or a violin a “chair”, well then something has to be done about that. And while it is easy to be certain about physical objects, things get harder in the realm of spiritual, fictional or ideological phenomena. We may all be certain that Donald Duck is not a real person, but we may certainly agree that the name Donald Duck refers to a character situated in a comic book and that this comic book is available in a physical reality. Is Donald Duck hence real? Donald Duck is obviously very real in regard to his impact on the cultural fabric in the societies he appeared. In Jungian psychology Donald Duck represents an archetype, which covers a range of characteristics of actual human beings. Donald Duck is real in this sense, because we know people who behave sometimes like Donald Duck would do and we recognize the behavior of Donald Duck as something we have encountered before in social interactions. But in comparison to Donald Duck, political terms are much harder to grasp. When we try to observe the term “wokeness” as Uninterested Observers, we cannot engage in the political partisanship that arises inevitably. The agreement about the term fails, because the presumptions are mutually exclusive in regard to the partisan lens. The question then is, if it is possible to take a step back and to determine a more general description of what we see? For us as Uninterested Observers, it is not a matter of being left or right, liberal or conservative, but mainly a twofold question: What are the main features of what we call “wokeness”? And how do these features impact real world communications? In order to do this I have identified five different ideas, which are connected to “wokeness” as a phenomenon of politics and culture and will deliver a more general perspective. The list is necessarily incomplete, and others may offer new or different versions of these ideas. These five ideas are: 1. The idea that human nature is an empty field of endless possibilities to operate on. 2. The idea that history is linear and moves on a steady path of progression. 3. The idea that all metaphysic systems are arbitrary or relative concepts. 4. The idea that political leadership should be held by philosopher kings. 5. The idea that any kind of political imperative must be global, rather than local. None of these ideas is definitely left or right, liberal or conservative. They represent attitudes and objectives of elites, media and intellectuals, taken into a broader context. I will address each of these ideas in separate posts. As a note, none of these ideas is inherently good or bad and none is an indisputable fact, rather than a bundle of ideological motivations that are prevalent or common among influential people. These ideas are most of all fashionable. The main trait of a fashionable idea is that it is rewarding to express it. It creates social, political and last not least financial revenue. Fashionable ideas are held by the coolest, smartest and by default most prestigious people. Prestigious people are prestigious because they hold fashionable ideas and ideas become fashionable because prestigious people propagate them. Fashionable ideas are in competition with good and bad ideas, and a fashionable idea can be good or bad in itself, but fashionable ideas usually outcompete all other ideas. Fashionable ideas are selected for their advantage to create fast and short-term rewards. Good ideas are not necessarily fashionable, which means they have a disadvantage in the selection process. Effectively, the five ideas I mentioned are fashionable, because they also advertise the idea to be the best solution to an underlying problem, but this claim is at best dubious. Fashionable ideas also create common attitudes, which advertise certain solutions as obvious answers to universal problems. But as an Uninterested Observer I personally would prefer to consider these ideas as unsolved problems of the human condition. Nobody should trust anyone who claims to have a solution to a universal problem. The best we can do is to identify the trade-offs, that the design of a specific solution offers. In the same way there is no agreement about the meaning of the term “wokeness” by two different partisan lenses, there is also no definitive answer to these ideas. They represent problems, to which currently no viable solution exist. As a short teaser I will address each of those, before I get on. Idea number four, that political leadership should be held by philosopher kings, refers to an idea of the Greek philosopher Plato, who recommended in his political philosophy that the best educated and most talented people should run the state. It is a brilliant idea, but it stops becoming one as soon as one recognizes that Plato had himself or people like himself in mind. Political leadership can never be diverse. In order to function as leadership, it must be bound to a special class of people, who share a certain narrative, which represents a set of values that provide guidance and direction. Philosopher kings can emerge only from current elites. For Plato this was a no-brainer. New elites have to establish their own tradition and they have to create the values their leadership depends on. During the course of the Russian Revolution, the old elites were murdered and exiled and the new elites, inexperienced in the use of state power ruined brutally the remains of the old system, but were unable to create the new order. The pattern that current elites are nevertheless always convinced to be the best people to run the state (and the economy of course) is not unknown in the succeeding history since Plato. So, the problem of politics then is not so much the difficulty to put the best people in charge, but how to determine who the best are. As I mentioned earlier, this is by all standards an unsolved problem. Idea number one on the other hand, that human nature is an empty field of endless possibilities to operate on, is only a few hundred years old and it does not refer to an unsolved problem of ancient times, but a new one, which states that technology is an integrationist solution to social discomfort. Technology and technological development appear in this point of view as the main carrier of progress itself. The more society relies on technological innovation the more enlightened, just, wealthy, equal and peaceful it will become. A telling example is Aaron Bastani’s book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which presents something as the solution, which is actually the problem. The summary explains: “Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness.” This sentence alone makes no sense, because automation does undermine economies built on full employment. There is no “rather” or “instead” here. The opinion that technology is the most effective way to overcome the pathologies of human nature was not held by a majority of intellectuals until recently, but right now it has become a mainstream point of view, which may or may not be shared by a majority of the population, but certainly by a majority of intellectuals and academia. Idea number three, that all metaphysic systems are arbitrary or relative concepts, tackles an unsolved problem of ancient times that was first formulated by Christian theology as a reaction to a Platonic concept about the nature of ideas and is known as the “Problem of Universals”. The question asked was basically: Do ideas in the same way exist as physical objects exist? The strain of philosophy that is called postmodernism puts the question differently, while attacking the same problem: Is the reality we perceive a creation of language? In many ways the themes and motifs of postmodernism are reflections of the revolution in physics that happened from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century. Terms like “Quantum non-locality” have recently made rounds and serve as a supportive argument for the postmodernist view that all reality is subjective, although the exact physical and mathematical formulations of Quantum non-locality don’t express the relationship between observers and observed that clearly. A more common term is “relativity”, which has become synonymous with a principle of uncertainty. Postmodern philosophers were fascinated by the imagination that nothing that exists is stable and hence the result of language based construction operations. What is “gravity” to physicists, is “language” to postmodernists. They were philosophers after all and developed an epistemological frame work to produce something that nowadays calls itself “Critical Race Theory”, “Intersectional Feminism” and “Queer Theory”. They are all refutations and objections to the simple question of metaphysics: Does truth as a non-relative concept exist? While the postmodernists are by no means the first ones to answer no, the majority of philosophical thinking throughout all of history said yes. It is new ground for any society to have a majority of intellectuals, artists and scientists who are convinced that metaphysical concepts of truth are irrelevant. Idea number two, that history is linear and moves on a steady path of progression, is known in the Anglo-Saxon world as “whig history” and is actually a very modern idea, only a few hundreds of years old. The political struggle between “Whigs” and “Tories”, which dates back to the 17th century, has some resemblance with the contemporary distinction between “progressives” and “reactionaries”. “Whigs” and “Tories” are tightly connected to a diverse strain of protestant churches, which were influenced by or attributed to the historical era we call “Enlightenment”. “Whig history” represents the expectation that historic progress has a predetermined trajectory towards a teleological goal, which is another version of the “belief in progress”, as Leo Strauss has put it. The variants in which this idea had appeared in history are very different. There may be imaginations about the end of times and coming apocalypses involved, but not necessarily so. Some version can be found in Francis Fukuyama’s famous book The End of History and The Last Man. But there are others, which predict the line of progress as an endless linear growth, without any references to an end. Marxism is certainly one of these, but also libertarian writers like Ayn Rand come to mind. A majority of historic civilizations did not perceive time as a linear progression, rather than a succession of circular repetitive development. Many cultures think of seasons as the most important time frames. Idea number five, that any kind of political imperative must be global rather than local, is a very simple generalization of a very complicated problem: governance. The process we call globalization is in full effect and it creates a gravitational pull on nation states and local communities politically, culturally and economically. The imperative to create global agendas is hence the question who is or should be in charge to install the solutions of these global agendas. And this creates a strong incentive to establish world governance by a system of global institutions which do not operate on the traditional basis of democratically elected officials inside nation states. The preference for such a global imperative … Continue reading Wokeness : A Research Program for the Uninterested Observer