Am I Anti-Woke?

Self-Reflection Inspired by Nick Cave, Plus a Taxonomy of Woke, Plus Rattle Bag

Nick Cave attending King Charles’s coronation. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

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For some reason I’m unfamiliar with Nick Cave’s music. I can sing just one of his songs, (Into My Arms), two if you count his duet with Kylie. I do, however, enjoy his blog posts. He can write unusually well for a rock star, indeed for a writer. I also like reading his interviews. He gave one to the Guardian this week, during which he gave his opinion on “wokeness”, which has prompted me to reflect on my own relationship with it.

(A note on the word: I don’t use ‘woke’ very much because it’s both highly charged and indistinct, but then so are a lot of words, eg ‘capitalism’, and sometimes we just have to make do for want of better alternatives.¹ I find woke a useful ‘know it when I see it’ shorthand.²)

Cave is, like most rock stars and artists, a left-leaning liberal, but he has a well-stocked mind which draws from various streams of influence, including and particularly Christianity (although he’s not a practicing Christian). As a result he takes positions that are unusual for his milieu. For instance, he has written that “cancel culture” is having “an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society.” In another blog post he says he’s repelled by “woke culture” because of its “lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims”.

Or take his attitude to the monarchy. Cave, who is Australian, says he is not a monarchist, but he was a big fan of the Queen (“the most charismatic woman I have ever met…she actually glowed”) and he happily attended the coronation of King Charles as part of the Australian delegation. We can laugh and say he’s trying have it both ways but I am sympathetic to his position. I think there’s a good rational case for our constitutional monarchy, but my real attachment to it is the one Cave describes here:

“I guess what I am trying to say is that, beyond the interminable but necessary debates about the abolition of the monarchy, I hold an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals – the strangeness of them, the deeply eccentric nature of the whole affair that so perfectly reflects the unique weirdness of Britain itself. I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring.”

In his book, Cave describes himself as ‘temperamentally conservative’. The Guardian interview is mostly about art and grief - Cave has lost two sons in the past nine years. But there’s a passage where the interviewer asks him about his self-professed conservatism. He gives an interesting answer:

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

This is the conservatism of Burke and Oakeshott. In the latter’s words: “The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.” You could call it loss aversion (RIP Daniel Kahneman) turned into a political, almost spiritual principle.

By the standards of most conservatives, Cave is a progressive, but I take him to be saying that he combines a conservative sensibility with a liberal one. This is how the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it: “Yes, there is a part of me, as I think there should be a part of everyone, that is conservative. There are things that we don’t want to change, you know.”

Artists ought to understand this ambiguity because that’s the kind of space in which great art gets made. Thinkers should get it too, because good thinking arises, in part, from the internal temperamental diversity described by Adichie. But ambiguity is uncomfortable, which is why Cave’s interviewer feels he has to ask the next question:

And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness…So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

Cave gives two reasons for disliking wokeness. First, because of its punitive moralism. Second (see his blog post) because of a doctrinal rigidity which he regards as antithetical to the open and curious attitude he relies on to make music. Wokeness involves the absence or repression of the conservative temperament, and an exclusion or shutting out of thoughts and sensibilities that don’t fit its algorithmic worldview.

Woke’s rules are new. It is not conventional left-liberalism, as is sometimes claimed, but a mutation of it which became mainstream in the last ten years. Even Obama is unwoke.

Wokeness is a social contagion at least as much as it is a set of ideas - I’m sorry to say it, but ‘mind-virus’ is not the most inapposite epithet I’ve ever heard. It has an amazing ability to make clever people say stupid things and to lower the IQ of institutions. I think that’s partly a function of an emphasis on appearances, on being seen to be saying the right thing, in a world where everyone feels on show, and vulnerable to a moralising ransomware attack.

That’s why so many people in positions of power have passively gone along with it, without quite buying into it. Up until recently (this is changing) wokeness has been a safe space for those who can’t or don’t want to risk thinking for themselves in public. The passivity of moderates allowed a minority of activists outsized influence, and woke’s worst aspects - divisiveness, scapegoating, obscurity, just the sheer absurdity it generates - to flourish without check.

Many woke positions or behaviours needn’t even be correlated with each other, and yet they seem to be bought off the shelf in a pack - buy one, get them all free. Its proponents dutifully use the same terms (‘equity’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘structural racism’ etc) without interrogating or debating or even understanding them.

In short, wokeness is not just about beliefs or debatable propositions, but social behaviour, language, and habits of mind. If you were to say “Is this woke?”, I’d have to look not just at the substantive position itself, but at how it has been arrived at and articulated.

It involves being wilfully unaware of your own political presumptions. Like other ideologies - leftists would say this about neo-liberalism - it pretends not to be one. Woke is just standing up for injustice! Woke is just kindness! I give you this priceless passage from a Gary Lineker interview:

Without prompting, he asks what is wrong with being woke. “I mean, what is woke? Having a conscience, having a heart, having empathy? How is that a bad thing?”

Lineker is a left-wing guy who, on the issues of the day, predictably and uncritically adopts whatever the fashionable left-wing position is, however tenuous or contentious. That’s not necessarily woke in itself, but doing so while pretending to be apolitical, and presenting oneself as just a kind, caring, stand-up guy - is a signature woke move. The other woke aspect to Lineker’s answer is that it’s a cliché delivered straight, with zero inflection, irony, or self-expression. Woke is a script rattled off without the intercession of an individual mind.

So how would I answer the Guardian’s question? Am I anti-woke? I’m obviously not pro-woke. But I’m not exactly Jordan Peterson either. I share Cave’s unease with being associated with rabid anti-woke nutjobs. I observe, in the anti-woke movement, the same sheep-like conformity to memes and slogans that I see among the pro-woke.

In 1924, G.K. Chesterton wrote about how the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The world is now dividing into a degraded version of this dichotomy: woke and anti-woke. You’re either for Kamala Harris or Ron DeSantis. You’re either for children being taught there are 183 different genders or you want to ban gay marriage.

I don’t fancy either side of that binary. Still, I don’t want to avoid the question by saying hey, I just see things as they are, don’t put a label on me (although it’s true, I don’t like putting a label on myself). Nor do I want to be one of those noble souls who love to say that things are “complicated” and we should value “nuance” - a word I’ve come to loathe - while being scared to name the simplest truths, in case they upset their readers.

I do think there is such a thing as woke, however cloudy, and I’m generally wary of its positions and jargon and habits of mind. But since some things I agree with are lumped under it, and since I just don’t enjoy wanging on about it all the time, I would not say I’m “anti-woke”. I would say I’m “woke-critical.”

In fact, I don’t trust commentators who aren’t woke-critical in some way. If part of your job is to point out hypocrisy and stupidity then you shouldn’t be able to avoid criticising wokeness, since it really is pervasive (here the anti-wokers are correct) in universities, some corporations, in many cultural and charitable institutions, and parts of government. But that needn’t mean using the rhetoric of its most mindless critics, or becoming monomaniacal about it.

Now we have a taxonomy of woke, or the beginning of one: pro-woke, anti-woke, woke-critical. But I think we can go further, with the help of Paul Graham’s essay on The Four Quadrants of Conformism.