Being “Right On”

There is a long chain of terms referring to the concept of “wokeness”, and I’m not sure which came first. I think it was probably “right on”, followed by “ideologically sound”. The phrase “loony left” is also in there somewhere, and later on there’s “politically correct” and finally “woke”. “Politically correct” was used with a somewhat different connotation in ‘I CLAVDIVS’, although it may just have been the 1976 TV series rather than the 1934 novel, which is itself based on the works of Suetonius and Tacitus, who both flourished in the second Christian century. If there really was a Latin version of the phrase “politically correct”, it presumably means that some kind of similar meaning existed almost two thousand years ago.

I find the fact that the phrase was used in ‘I, Claudius’ absolutely fascinating. It occurs in episode XII and emerges from the mouth of Pallas:

Aulus Plautius writes that Augustus means nothing to the Britons, but they’re more than happy to worship you as a god. He regrets having taken the decision without first consulting you, but feels sure that you understand that it was politically correct. The temple is known as the Temple of the God Claudius.

Uxor Claudii interfecta erat. Claudius’s wife had been killed. More specifically, she was executed by order of Claudius, for expedient reasons. Sarada is the expert on the novels and TV series, so I shall bow to her judgement and fervently hope that she chips in after I post this, but my understanding is that politics in the late Republic and early Empire is kind of Machiavellian and pragmatic, and there are “correct” ways of doing things in the sense of it being etiquette writ large, and in this situation “politically correct” merely means expedient – convenient and practical without regard to right or wrong. This brings up the issue generally of how conservative politics “ought” to work generally, and in the context of Roman history it’s the Republic which is in the conservative position in spite of the fact that it’s less authoritarian and more democratic than the Empire, which abandoned democracy as a means of increasing its power, and perhaps providing bread and circuses.

Anyway, it’s notable that the same general idea keeps being renamed and rehashed, and this seems to have been going on for something like five decades now. The phrases “right on” and “ideologically sound” are respectively late ’70s and early ’80s in vintage so far as I can tell. The first of these now has connotations of being “down with the kids” and “cool”, perhaps because the idea of being right on was more mainstream, at least in youth culture, than it is today. “Ideologically sound” has a more judgemental flavour of thought policing about it, but since it has an “-ology” can be considered as portraying the idea as quasi-scientific, and I have a lot of sympathy with that because I feel there can be such a thing as rationally planned and evidence based politics, based on research and theory rather than something like surveys and focus groups about what might be popular or could be spun in a particular way to make it appeal to the electorate. “Loony Left” has the obvious problem of having an ableist slur in it, so for the first time the idea is, well, two things: pejorative and insulting to the people holding to it. However, there’s a caveat there which I’ll come to. At the time, the word “loony” was used freely by both the Left and Right, including the famous poster of Margaret Thatcher with the slogan “There is only one loony left”, as seen above. To today’s “woke” generation, that poster seems anachronistic and insulting to the mentally ill, and it’s notable that it’s a left wing poster as well, which does suggest that there has been some change.

“Politically correct” in its near-contemporary sense is a recycling of the idea of the “loony left” with a connotation more similar to “ideologically sound”. The difference between the two is really that the first implies lack of contact with reality in a pathologised way, whereas the second entails lack of contact with reality due to an overarching belief system into which everything can be fitted regardless of its connection with reality, but based, perhaps, on overthinking and failure to engage with the “man on the Clapham omnibus”, and of course it would be a man in this context rather than someone else. However, it could also be that this older connotation of “politically correct” is still present in the newer usage of the term because the concerns expressed may be tokenistic and superficial. I don’t know if the initialism “BAME” for “Black And Minority Ethnic” is widely accepted by people conforming to that description or not, although I do know that some people in that category don’t welcome it at all. I’m not an insider in that respect, but one thing I am an insider to is “LGBTQ2IA+”, which I think is ridiculous and potentially dangerous. It doesn’t make sense to have a long acronym which invites disrespect when you could replace it with something like “Gender and Sexual Minorities” (GSM), “Queer”, or my idea “L+” – “Lesbians and other groups marginalised or in a minority in connection with sexuality, gender or romantic proclivity”. The problem with them is their inelegance. They don’t feel like they were invented by an arts graduate or someone talented at writing or coinage of new words. They’re also jargon, and jargon is anti-language. It’s about hoarding information, signalling that you are in an in-group, and these are supposed to be about out-groups, and tokenism. You can’t fix society just by inventing new words to describe it and using them to communicate that you’re better than everyone who doesn’t use them. Language is clearly important, but it isn’t everything.

This, I think, is the germ of truth at the hostility of the Right (and I’m going to analyse that soon too) to the use of these phrases and ideas. There’s an element of what the Right calls virtue-signalling in this. You have to be careful what you mean with that phrase. It wasn’t originally politicised and doesn’t represent a new phenomenon, but there could be said to be two different ways in which this kind of language is being used. In one form, the language is used as an organic part of the person’s or group’s value system, and in this respect is less problematic although the clumsiness of the terminology and its opacity to many are still troubling. In another, the language can be used either cynically or unwittingly tokenistically, as a form of slacktivism, like signing online petitions or sharing links about certain topics without bothering to read them on social media. It can even be used as a form of political correctness in the older sense of the term, as a way of making it seem like an organisation cares when in fact it doesn’t and has done nothing to address more systemic or institutional issues. This can be seen, for example, in the use of quotas for employment of minority groups where an employer reaches a certain point where they have the minimum required number of Black or disabled people and proceeds to shut down the possibility of anyone else in those categories working for them.

Hence there really is a problem with wokeness if it’s superficial, and that should be acknowledged rather than digging in harder. That said, that isn’t all there is to wokeness, and there’s a particular danger in obliviousness to privilege and getting groups to oppress themselves.

One of the more insidious aspects of prejudice is that those who don’t bear the brunt of it don’t notice it. This means that if you are, for example, an able-bodied White heterosexual adult man, there are likely to be few to no examples of prejudice against you due to aspects of your identity. I am of course a White middle class able-bodied adult myself, and as such I just will be unaware of many of the benefits I accrue from being in these various privileged groups. If there is an aspect of your identity which is not privileged, you may or may not be aware of it, but if you are, it may then be possible to generalise across the board and put yourself in the position of someone who is in a marginalised group of another kind. This is, for example, why there’s such a thing as Black Womanism as well as feminism: Black men are subject to racism and therefore share some interests with Black women which White men do not share (in an immediate sense) with White feminists, and also White feminists are alleged (since I’m not feminist I can’t comment for certain on this) to tend to focus more on their own position in a White world of better-paid jobs and the like, and this is of course a generalisation which may reflect my own privilege in various ways.

Then there’s the issue of internalised prejudice. A person with one of these characteristics may consider herself to be defective in some way because of them or to blame herself for her situation. This is of course the “Uncle Tom” effect of excessive deference to White people. If someone also subscribes to the idea that they have power to change their circumstances, if those circumstances don’t change and it’s to do with an aspect of their perceived identity this can lead to them blaming themselves for it, and this is learned helplessness, a crucial aspect of the behavioural model of depression. An extra problem can emerge here because it could be that an aspect of someone’s identity might not even be recognised anywhere as a source of prejudice. For instance, this is a trivial example, but because my surname is short I have problems with my bank account due to the assumption that all last names have at least four letters. I’m not going to heap pity on myself for this because it isn’t important and makes hardly any difference to my life, but there are other aspects of who someone is which are both far less trivial and far less recognised. An example of this in my own life is my former button phobia, which was pretty seriously disabling but gave me perspective on other forms of prejudice.

One particularly poorly recognised source of prejudice is against neurodiversity. Neurodiversity could be understood to mean “being on the autistic spectrum”, but the problem with that idea is that those characteristics are not a one-dimensional gradient but more like a landscape. It’s also not just about autism, but many other aspects such as attention deficit and dyslexia, and even left-handedness and cross-dominance. Another trivial example stemming from my cross-dominance is that computer pointing devices are usually on the right hand side of keyboards and their cables may even emerge through a hole on the right side of the desk they’re on, and place settings in restaurants tend put the fork on the left and the knife on the right. In both situations, my own neurodiversity means I always have to swap the cutlery and the pointing device over, and in the latter case that isn’t always possible. It doesn’t make a huge impact on my life but is an example of unanticipated neurodiversity, and this is important.

Words such as “racism”, “sexism” and “homophobia” are often understood to reflect active and conscious prejudice, and of course that does happen and is undesirable. However, it should also be borne in mind that these are not the central problems with these features of society. For instance, because of the disadvantages Black people have had historically in this country, Black children are less likely to see Black people in prestigious positions, and therefore lack rôle models, and since many of them were deemed educationally subnormal due to cultural biasses in intelligence tests they may not be able to perform to their true potential, and so forth. Social connections between White people may go all the way up to the top of society, since our nobility and royalty are very often White, and because White people, whose families may have become rich because of the Atlantic slave trade, already have such connections it’s easier for them to reach these positions. None of this has anything to do with anyone alive today consciously or unconsciously judging someone by their skin colour, and also, even White people suffer from structural racism because we miss out on the talents of that section of society.

Nowadays strong connections tend to be made between what might be called “wokeness” and the Left, which in fact may not make a lot of sense. Historically, trade unions have opposed Black workers and women being employed, and if the forms of government described as “Communist” are examined more closely there is often quite severe homophobia involved. For example, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua are on record for seeing homosexuality as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois, and the Communist Party of Britain historically supported the homophobic régime in the Soviet Union, and still supports the People’s Republic of China where the psychiatric profession still runs the health care system based on the assumption that homosexuality is a mental illness. Meanwhile, the party in Britain with the largest gay membership is actually the Conservative Party. It’s entirely feasible to analyse marginalised groups in terms of class struggle, but this is often subject to problems such as the lack of appeal to those in the working class who are sexist, racist and homophobic. But the message here is that although we are accustomed to thinking of “woke” culture as Left wing, it actually isn’t, which isn’t the same as saying it’s wrong but indicates that the problem of prejudice is more deep-seated.

Semantic drift is probably worth addressing here. It’s a recognised phenomenon in language that words change their meaning over time. Three particularly good, and possibly connected, examples are the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. The word “nice” originally meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “happy” and “gay” seems to have meant “pretty”, although this is controversial. It would be easy to see the disquiet I feel with superficial wokeness as akin to the rather spurious objection some people make to the loss of an older meaning of the word “gay”, when it wasn’t in fact a significant part of their vocabulary and in fact this is tacit homophobia. Against this I would say that the constant attempt to rehash the idea of “right on” is a way to make it look like a new onslaught on the supposèd rights of the privileged fuelled by shadowy agenda. It appeals to people’s aversion to novelty after a certain age or mindset has been adopted, to be ageist for a moment. To restate then, it appeals to aversion to novelty by making it look like a new attack on reason.

Then there’s the question of cultural appropriation. This is complicated by two different processes. On the one hand is the internalisation of oppression. If a person of a particular culture sees a prestige culture adopt one of their practices, they may admire this and see it as a compliment, which is fine, but this could be coming from a position where they judge their own culture as inferior to the other, and they may also adopt a practice which is more negative into their own culture from the other. For instance, the Chinese pronoun 他 used to mean “she/it/he” and lacked a sense of gender. In the twentieth century,  她 was introduced to mean “she”, using 女, the 漢字 (hanzi) meaning “woman”, to emulate Western languages. To twenty-first century eyes this looks like a backwards step, and I would say it’s based on unthinking emulation of Western practices. The other process is inappropriate nationalism. This comes into Yoga and some Indian philosophy. As I’ve mentioned recently, there are attempts to claim Yoga for India and I’ve witnessed this being extended to Carvaka. There’s also a very common idea that one’s own national language is ancestral to all or many others, which happens in India, Hungary, with Hebrew and for some reason with the Antwerp dialect of Dutch. I should just briefly explain that Carvaka is an Indian school of philosophy which is atheistic on the grounds that karma is enough to explain the workings of the Universe. This has a cultural sensibility distinctive of South Asia to some extent, although it reflects the “just world hypothesis” which is widespread in our species. I have personally been accused of cultural appropriation for discussing Carvaka. However, if you believe that Carvaka has historically been used to describe the nature of the Cosmos or believe that it now does, and I think that’s rare but I’m not sure, then it’s on a par with Western physics and metaphysics and not the property of a particular culture. I cannot currently see that as problematic, although I’m open to persuasion.

On the other hand, I do see Judaism as having a point here, and this is where I return to the issue of cultural appropriation as a bad thing. I have a problem because I have faith that God is moving me to study the Talmud even though I’m Gentile and the Orthodox view is that I shouldn’t. Some Orthodox Jews also emphasise the Noachic Covenant with respect to Gentiles. This is the idea that after the Flood (you don’t have to believe in that literally), God imposed a covenant on all human beings to follow, and only later made it more specific to the Jews, that we should follow seven mitzvot. My issue with this is mainly that it seems to be very conservative in nature, but the point is that there is a moral system for the Gentiles to follow. As you may know, I don’t currently count myself as a faithful Christian because I see the behaviour of people whom I accept on faith to be Christian themselves as not showing evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and this is not judgemental so much as concern that they were promised help which is not available to them. There’s also the issue of the Blood Curse in Matthew 24:25 –

 Τὸ αἷμα αὐτοῦ ἐφ’ ἡμᾶς καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ τέκνα ἡμῶν

• His blood be on us and on our children.

This is reported to have been said by the Jews in response to Pontius Pilate after Christ’s trial. The situation is then that much of Judaism is adopted wholesale into the early Church, where it becomes used for anti-semitic purposes, ultimately leading to the Holocaust. I can’t be doing with this and I do regard it as cultural appropriation. This leaves me in the awkward position of being a Gentile in the Judæo-Christian tradition who must also reject rabbinical Judaism but remain theistic. The Noachic Covenant, as well as being conservative, simply doesn’t seem sufficient. Why should we be governed by only seven mitzvot? What’s wrong with having 613? But in any case, it really feels like cultural appropriation to me and consequently I feel that although I can remain in the Abrahamic tradition, Christianity as it’s normally understood and practiced is inappropriate.

In conclusion, then, I have probably blundered in here where others would’ve been more cautious and thoughtful, but sometimes it’s better to say something than remain silent on an issue. If I want one thing to be taken away from this, it’s that historical and social processes have led to a society which exhibits racism, sexism, ableism and other “isms” in its very structure, and although we need to take responsibility for this and act against it so as not to be part of the problem, it isn’t about scapegoating White, able-bodied heterosexual men. It’s just that they, and to the extent that I am in those categories, we, do benefit from our privilege and should do something to share our benefits with others. Don’t go away with the idea that I think these are deliberately perpetrated. I don’t think anyone maliciously wore clothes with buttons just to freak out button-phobic people back in the day, and I don’t think there’s some evil conspiracy among office furniture designers to put the mouse cable hole on the right side of their desks, but the fact remains that these features are problematic for some people, and we should do something about them.