The Woke Right: A Response to Neil Shenvi
Part I: A Response to Neil Shenvi
Neil doesn't like that the woke, right or left, get caught up in psychological oppression dynamics. Unfortunately, that's key to everything here. Every society has a priestly class that debate over ethics and framing and symbolism in order to manage the consensus over what is ethically acceptable. (That's what Neil and I are doing right now!) Psywars. Binding the conscience. In Anglo-American society, consensus is so important to public political life -- it has something to do with proving your fundamental goodness in order to be worthy of ascending to higher degrees of representative influence. Those who get to shape the narrative have, slowly but on the long scale, enormous power over how the society takes shape as people race to prove themselves worthy. However, as Anglo-American values fade in society, and the internet upsets old propaganda machines like television and journalism and the university system, group consensus is starting to get really weird and wobbly. We're beginning to realize just how artificial so many past narratives were, and fringe groups are emerging to try and unleash new dominant metanarratives on us: victimhood ideologies, neonationalisms, esoteric stuff, whatever.
This is classic postmodern epistemic warfare. But Neil finds this distasteful. Anything that smacks of this jockeying for metanarrative control, right or left, he will have to label "woke," because to the liberal all relevant knowledge about what is true and good in human life is immediately accessible through disseminated science and through our incredibly strong, trustworthy institutions. Some call it The Cathedral (others, a synagogue); I'd call it the unitarian magisterium of a world empire. The classical liberal (Christian or not) in America today has no choice but to offer this magisterium his total psychological fealty. Or at least, control over the parameters of his thoughts — maybe it doesn’t tell him directly what to believe, but it tells him what he ought to never take seriously. If he questions that standard, he becomes fringe. In a previous decade, debates over the boundaries of public discourse in the magisterium were about origins and atheism. Now the conversation has evolved into blacks and whites.
We have many of the relevant facts. A superabundance. But in the epistemic battlefield, it's all about how those facts are deployed, and how we can guilt and shame one another into owing us something, or rely on a fact to be proud in the face of public guilt tripping and shaming. (Not just guilt, which is personal, but shame, which is public and splashes back on how everyone relates to you.) And because people are lazy and don’t read, they often don’t even bother to keep track of the very open and public facts/theories that their enemies have widespread access to and are using against them, other than a cursory survey in order to dismiss them and feel better about themselves.
And so, a critical attitude — a critical theory, even — is absolutely necessary to navigate this environment and assert the truth against flagrant lies, or, resituate true facts that are being weaponized against your group.
The cold war / boomer attitude among conservatives and liberals was to just gloss over a lot of those issues of race and identity, and get to making money and buying a bigger house. Laugh off the issue. How about that Political Correctness, am I right? But now that the houses are getting a little harder, a little harder to attain (economic problems), and there are just a little fewer, a little fewer white people around (race problems), suddenly these issues are swelling into prominence...
Conservatives and liberals from the previous era are aghast at identity politics running wild among the young. They see how destructive it is to the old peace. But they can't see how their own economic actions and lies papering over racial differences were only building up to this enormous backlash from both the right and left. (Well, I don't actually think the backlash is very large yet except in speech — which I think it can be tuned out by a lot of people even still! — but I think the backlash will only grow and grow until it's not just speech...)
I appreciate Neil's commitment to defining his terms and calibrating his rhetoric carefully. But the fact is that he is committed to a vanishing cold war order of ethics and rhetoric that was based on injustice and lies in order to annihilate the white anglo saxon protesant identity at the heart of this nation, to paper over our differences and amalgamate us into a more perfect union. The unitarian magisterium has wanted us to pretend that WASPs and Catholic peoples and Jews and Blacks and anyone else fro all over the world are all fundamentally identical. But it just hasn't worked, because it isn't true.
This is why "the woke is more correct than the mainstream." The woke left may have incorrect goals and procedures with how to remedy the problems of everyone being fundamentally unequal, but they come so much closer to acknowledging it. The "woke right" also recognizes everyone's fundamental inequality, even though they map it biologically rather than economically (based on what they see as primary). For my part, I see both economics and biology as crucial and inseparable. But old style liberals and conservatives continue to march on with the crude lies about how everyone is equal.
We are not the same. We are not equal.
That is the most basic red pill you can have. And Neil needs to take it.
Let the symbol of the postliberal discourse be this:
≠
We are not equal. And don’t let anyone guilt trip you over that basic, essential, economic, biological truth. Now, whether we should strive to be more equal or in what ways and according to what procedures — that’s all grounds for legitimate ethical debate. But we can only proceed if we agree that we aren’t equal.
Where the label "woke" becomes unhelpful is because it is already stretched so far, to stretch it to encompass the entire political spectrum even at the horseshoe ends is just too much. The right and left are "red pilled" or "woke" according to very different narratives. It’s another lame attempt at papering over differences, trying to assert that, well, because they share a belief that inequality is one of the most potent forces in your life. Continuing to lie about fundamental inequality doesn’t tell us at all about how or why or what we ought to do about it. It just continues to gum up the works of society at every level.
I do like how even-handed and professional Neil is in his rhetoric. He sees certain complaints of the right as valid even if he disagrees with the overall framework and posture. I think those on the right wing would do well to imitate him in this tone. And I suspect that Neil really does believe that we are all equal, or at least wants us to be equal so badly that it controls his thinking.
Neil can repeat facts like "Blacks are discriminated against relative to White candidates in job interviews." Or "Whites are discriminated against relative to Blacks and Hispanics in elite college admissions." But it appears he would be incapable of ever understanding why some of that discrimination might be good, why in many situations it might be right to discriminate. Because we are not equal, and — so I would say — we should not expect equal treatment.
He says things like "What norms are hegemonic in rural Idaho? On a highly progressive college campus? In South Central LA? In San Francisco’s Chinatown? The answer is entirely dependent on your physical (and cultural) location."
He implicitly indicates by how he frames this that he believes that all of those places and institutions are equal, sort of laid out on a neutral grid. He has no way of gradating their relative power in the hegemonic discourse, because he doesn't believe there is a hegemonic discourse. Because, it seems, he believes we are all equal.
But in the university system, that is, our society's official accredited status system of public honors, there is a carefully calibrated ethical system by which the qualitative status of all of those different ethnic groups and geographies have all been quietly weighed out — and in many ways, shaped and controlled. Likewise in the markets, there is an enormously complex financialization system that shapes and controls what all of those geographies and the populations in them are worth, according to quantities. These are great institutions. They help us control the whole world with mere symbols. We don’t even need to take out our guns. (…right?)
Both status giving and the money system are forms of control, and they are deeply embedded in one another; and often though not always clearly unified in vision. They are the powers and principalities of this age; the matrix of symbols that enslave us and our desires, that determine most of our waking actions. There may not always be a clear view of the very top of the power structure, but there is always a vertical ascent. There are real and obvious hierarchies here.
Neil is wrong that "wokeness will tear the church apart." Wokeness and redpilling is merely an ideological reaction to what is tearing the church apart: the lies and injustice embedded in the power structures of our nation, in the university system and markets, as well as in our own hearts. Whichever factions are closer to the truth, and closer to justice, will in some odd way prevail.
[Aside: I actually like a lot of what Neil had to say about racism being sinful. Given what he described, he was totally correct to apply scripture accordingly. But of course he fails, just as many of those with boomer cosmology fail, to understand that in the new age we are delineating (and inventing) hundreds of new forms of racism. Only some of those are obviously sinful, some are just weird, and others are obviously good and right. Teenage TikTok kids (right or left) would be able to skate circles around Neil in just how many different forms of racism they could taxonomize (and no doubt perform as virtuosos). He should really study the actual habits and behaviors of online racism much more closely before he continues to speak on that specific issue and try to morally guide them.]
Of course, I could be totally wrong about the course of society. Maybe the cold war propaganda is more truthful and socially robust than the woke, redpill alternative metanarratives that have been cooked up by the freaks online. Maybe things will just revert to the "normal" of 30 years ago. If that happened, then I would be embarrassed, and Neil would be proven to be in the right for denying the validity of critical theories and belief in hegemonic power struggles. But I just don't buy it. In some ways, I hope that he's right, because his implied vision of America and its future is a much cozier one that mine.
I think all of this newfangled social technology is going to continue to rip society apart, over the next century at least. The spine that held the machine together — the "postwar consensus" — will be ripped from our back, vertebra by vertebra.
Part II: My Own Thoughts on the Dissident Right
While there is a lot up in the air regarding long term state formation and how that will conclusively settle issues of identity, I think it's fair to say the cold war consensus for american evangelicalism is showing faultline cracks between managerialists and heartlanders, and suburbanites cast about it in the abyssal whirlwind between the two, growing nervous. New priests, hungry to take advantage of the trends, are moving in like bandits to lead off groups in their chosen direction. The two most striking young platforms at the moment are the multiracial hivemind empaths and the Trumpist white pirates. Really, these are just two polarized ethical cosmologies that help us understand who we are, how we treat our neighbors, who is the evil faction of unclean freaks, how we should deal with demographic shifts in America, and each are battling for control of the label 'Christian.' (Both sides have their unclean freaks, but in which way they are perceived as unclean is how the boundaries are incarnated. I don’t want to be associated with THOSE freaks, give me THESE freaks.)
Being scots irish and a fundamentalist, my natural sympathies are obviously with the white identitarians. I think the other side leads nowhere but subjugation and faggotry. But what do we do with this new 'woke right'? Seems like they have some new insights and spicy opinions and charismatic personalities. Why shouldn’t I join in…?
Unfortunately, white identitarianism draws the worst sorts. Cranks, goofs, people with a lot of bitterness and rage. (This is why I claim Evangelical Cosmopolitan Aristocratic Tribalism, rather than “Christian Nationalism” or “White Nationalism.”) I think it's perfectly reasonable at this point for normal, good American Christians to see this ragged band and say, "Those guys are freaks. I don't want to be associated with them at all."
A recurring problem in society is that people are unwilling to associate with the unclean. No matter what our ultimate views, Christians should be fearless in the face of the threat of “tarnishing” — of being tainted by association. This is explicitly modeled by Christ. So, the rightists can easily become morally self-righteous “ah, poor me, persecuted for the truth, and no one will associate with me because of their hypocrisy...” Maybe. Certainly there is a double standard for being associated with the far left vs. the far right. But maybe you're also just obnoxious and no obvious benefit to anyone. Not everyone has time and energy to be equally charitable to every tar baby out there. Sometimes it's appropriate to say worthless men just need to hit the road — whether they're racist or white or black or whatever. Beat it. Scram.
I think there is a place for jestermaxxing and playing the fool, obviously. I think it's great that there is a hearty culture of trolling online. It's getting a lot of work done to discredit hypocrites and phonies and changing a lot of people's minds about things. But the trickster life is necessarily a fringe and barbarous thing. Mostly normal people living mostly normal lives have to go around concerned about slowly accumulating honor and capital, and not flushing it all down the drain on highly ambiguous, and potentially very evil, political projects. How do we pick up the signals of what makes something reliable? The wealth of the institution? The goodness of the people involved? It really isn't about principles. It's about personalities.
If you're really waging a war for cultural supremacy, you're going to have to develop a much higher standard of honor. That's the only way to draw talent and prestige, which is the only way you can begin to exercise influence as a tiny minority. Trumpist style populism is very fun and gets people's attention but it doesn't do anything unless you have everyone else on board. And in America, ironically, a group of loyal populists will always be a minority, because coalitions of organized managers are always able to wield the numerous other populations here against you, because what you are loyal to is not the present but the Past. You are a lover of relics. You are a warrior from the world of memory. That inspires me. But how much ground can actually be won is up to God and the talents he has given you.
Here's where I show my hand: I wish I could be elite, but I'm really not. Maybe I have a shot at becoming superior than average in a couple categories of human activity by the time I die, but I like many ordinary guys with populist leanings simply do not have what it takes to truly Govern what needs to be Governed. In other words, because of my personal failings, and because of your personal failings, white America is toast. If I had better manners, if you had better manners, we'd all be more loveable and virtuous and capable of inspiring more love and virtue in others. But instead, we sin. We're not reproducing and the state is importing populations from around the world to keep the machine churning. At best we will exist in covenant enclaves around the nation, and even those may be challenged by the law and broken open like honeycombs — lest we “deplete resources” of everyone else by “white fortressing” or by being religiously segregated. People have been talking about pillarization a little bit. We should talk even more about it.
Personally, I think a covenant enclave would be great. As a Christian, it would definitely have to be inclusive towards ethnic minorities, just as my church is. But they would naturally be screened by the doctrinal considerations. But one wonders how much the churches that we choose are designed not just for their doctrine but for the kind of cultural standards that push away certain types and allure others — not even on a purely racial basis, but also class. The confessional church I participate in brings in a fairly different kind of white from the kinds of big box megachurches that I grew up with. (The Reformed church in America is a religion for engineers and professionals, by virtue of its formalism and granular specificity of doctrine, and this is an enormous demographic filter.) As such, my social opportunities are different. The people around me are better educated and approach wealth very differently.
Anyway, expect the guilt trips to get even weirder than they are now. In an attempt to enforce multiethnic social solidarity, people are either going to want to double down on black worship (wokeness) or white sectarianism (the right). Friendships will continue to be strained and lost. In the church or out of the church, it will be this way increasingly unless there is a conclusive resolution to the demographic crisis. (And let's face it, no one wants a conclusive resolution, anymore than we want a "final solution.") We crave trust, as human beings, and when we don't know who we are it's hard to know who to trust. But Christians, even across political and racial lines, need to practice trusting each other even in the midst of shifting loyalties and gang wars. Because our trust is in God. Duh.
You don't need to give in to the guilt trips. You can just follow your conscience. And you don't have to guilt trip others. Or fight with them. Personally, I think it's possible to have a positive ethnic identity, and to have cultural goals in this life, while still living a life of peace in the church and not getting into fights. But maybe that's my American optimism and cushy spot in northern Idaho speaking. (Cushy, if culturally paranoid. I promise I’ve never even been out to visit these fabled wignat enclaves rumored to exist in this region. I’m sure these people are out nearby but I haven’t met them yet. ) As different factions compete for being the "party of truth and justice" and evangelicals try to weigh these things, go about making sure that your side on an issue really is the side of truth and justice. I think white conservative evangelicals have totally abandoned biblical teaching on how they are suppose to live with regard to money, status, comfort, and the poor. So I am not surprised the middle class is becoming much more tense and fragmented. God's judgment. Nevertheless, these deep cultural problems don't change the fact that I am a white conservative evangelical. It's who I am. They are my people, and who I owe my greatest loyalty on earth to. In any case I think the right wing has to have some concept of caring for the needy besides "suppressing the dysgenic."
Evangelicals don’t realize how much of their values are shaped by their suburban lifestyles, which in turn were so hugely shaped by white flight from leftist mismanagement and ethnic criminality in American cities 50 years ago, and their firm commitment to cold war era half-truths designed to steer them peacefully through it all. Conservative men pour their life force into gathering private wealth either so they can get to live in that exclusive zip code they desire or to overcome the powerlessness they feel from having had their nation taken away from them piece by piece, all while lying to themselves about why they’re doing what they’re doing. So much of our legal, financial, educational, and political systems are built around trying to maintain all these different lies and desires in tension with one another. These lies are baked into the foundation so deeply that once they give away, the evangelical church as we know it might just pop out of existence, or really just become something radically alien in appearance, with a totally reformed culture. I hope a spiritually revived one.
If any faction was half as committed to truth and justice as they claimed to be, they would dominate the culture instantly. But each side wants to milk their grievances and scapegoat their enemy for as much power and immediate advantage as possible. In the long run, this is why everyone proves incapable of maintaining the center, and so few men of virtue emerge with the gravitas necessary to alter the system rather than be altered by it.
This gets into the highly toxic public sphere-private sphere dilemma of liberal and conservative interaction. Liberal managerialists commit to the Public Center, and that means doling out favors to all the ethnicities. They endure jobs of middling pay and prestige, and living in dirty cities full of crime, in order to exert cultural influence over everyone. Conservatives, knowing that the Center is controlled by those who hate them, retreat even further into the decentralized private sphere periphery to accrue power, status, and wealth as much as they can, as free of liberal meddling and ethnic interference as possible, and only return to intervene in political life to keep the Liberal Hierarchical Center from burdening with them even more with loathsome bureaucracy and taxes than they already have, with each side assuring themselves they are morally in the right for having pursued power in the way they did, and assuring themselves that what they're doing is in the best interest of ethnic minorities. In reality, both factions have made intractable faustian bargains. Left power seeking leads to enormous birth decline, so they reproduce parasitically through schools and universities and arts communities and gay propaganda, et al. Conservative flight from city centers, culture and political life means that if their children want to do anything interesting with their lives, they will be seduced by the left. So the cycle goes ad infinitum, with the only permanent change being that everyone's IQ is lower — increasingly stupid people getting more inept at seducing one another. I reject this gay system. Insofar as this is how conservative American culture is defined, I reject it. I know that this is the normalcy of a domestic order that conservatives cherish and want to defend as much as possible. But it is gay and dying and I reject it.
Be generous in this time of hollowing social consensus when others zig where you zag. At the extremes, one friend will become a homosexual communist. Another will become a Nazi. One zigs, one zags. But they're responding to the exact same social and economic pressures, according to their own desires and gut. So try to keep the friendship strong as possible. Try to win them back to fellowship, to nature and to peace. Be good to other people regardless of their affiliation. Love is the only part you can control. That love is the glue that ties everything together no matter how crazy it gets.
I'm not a communist, but I think conservative evangelicals could learn an enormous amount if they spent more time listening to communists, reading critical theory, engaging. I'm not a white nationalist, but I think conservative evangelicals could learn an enormous amount if they spent more time listening to white nationalists, reading frogtwitter, engaging. But I suppose it's hard for a lot of people to sift through very thorny and potentially diabolical competing worldviews. But the learned among us, the ones who truly read books, have an obligation to take these traditions very seriously — they too are out there evangelizing — they are the main competition for worldview seduction. And they are not equal at all, but very asymmetrically powerful in different ways, and correct in totally different modes.
I dislike that many of the conservative evangelicals I know who do read books only read other conservative evangelicals. This leads to intellectual inbreeding, echoed blindspots. Instead, we need to read more communists and white nationalists, with a critical eye. These different factions are dealing with the very issues that conservative evangelicals (and all Americans) have to deal with, but from a radically different perspective. Both sides expose gaps in the others history and theory of the world, even if we reject many of their core tenets.
But it can be very irritating to have to read people who you disagree with so thoroughly. This simple irritation is why people stay so ignorant. It's just that much more abrasive to deal with the people you disagree, who you are convinced have nothing to teach you. But this abrasiveness made easier when you come to believe that a lot of radical communists can have very detailed and correct studies about economic relations and their history, and likewise a lot of nationalists can have very detailed and correct observations about the behavior of different ethnicities. (I don't mean just watching videos by BreadTube or groypers online, but going upstream to their Sources.) So we can simply learn so many facts from these factions that you can't from the small circular pool of evangelicals only studying other evangelicals. It's how these radicals deploy those assembled facts according to their worldview, their belief about what goodness is or what Society Ought to Be, that then we get into serious disagreements.
Women might have a hard time understanding this upcoming chaos because they don't understand that the way men process threats and security is very different from how they process threats. Women process security issues as potential victims. Men process security issues like this as the potential enforcers of violence. So how they position themselves and what alliances they seek in a time of highly ambiguous identity and loyalty might be confusing to one another. Just one more way for men and women to misunderstand one another.
To sum it all up, I have so many sympathies for the dissident right, and I'm happy to read them and gain insights from their redpills. I don’t mind at all being labelled as one if I associate too closely, and I don’t mind at all if someone judges me insufficiently right wing for how much I appreciate modernism and communist theories and culture made by homosexuals and Jews. I think the best of the dissident right read things very sharply. But from everything I can see, I think their substantive political goals (as much as those might benefit me as a white man) are doomed to failure, requiring a talent base and ethical consensus that doesn't exist and will grow even more strained and divided in the future, fighting for a prize (cozy white suburbia) that God might not even want them to have. AKA, “everyone does what is right in his own eyes,” acceleration of anarcho-tyranny, etc. But America is always full of surprises.
I dislike all this "we are pilgrims on earth, we are in exile" mentality that can dominate Christian rhetoric. We often aren't. I don't think it has to be that way, I don't think it always was in the past or always will be in the future. But, I think increasingly in the near future white American evangelicals with my beliefs will be made into exiles, so we might as well start praying and preparing. The unitarian magisterium may crack and fall apart, but they hate us so much I'm sure they will in their dying efforts do whatever they can to make sure that we are the last people on earth who could inherit their status and wealth. Unless, of course, a generation of evangelical cosmopolitan aristocratic tribalists emerged so talented and determined to seize the reins of technocracy... all the arts and letters in their sway... opinion formation throughout the world empire... the Daniel Option... dream interpretation for the nobility... evangelical eunuchs at the highest reaches of the hierarchy of magi securing safety for the people of God... but I digress into fantasy.
A toast to white America, and to the 20th century. I love that heritage. It should haunt us like a ghost. Looking back at history, with its power, industry, whiteness, those remarkable moments of American innocence — the whole century becomes Lynchian in retrospect now that those things are slipping away from us.