It's too bad we don't have consensus name and a canon for the ideology that "woke", "the successor ideology", etc. are trying to describe. Or, even better, if the people associated with these ideas identified with the name self-consciously. One of the virtues of Communism *as an ideology* is that it has an agreed-upon name and is founded on Marx's writings, which are extensive, coherent and brilliant, even where they have proven disastrous in practice.
The people who believe in this ideology really seem to see it as consisting in a series of moral imperatives, and by not naming it, or thinking of it as a proper ideology, they can simply presume its universality without having to examine the actual scope of these imperatives. If the ideology were a named phenomenon identified with some canonical texts, it would have to be defended intellectually in philosophical terms, rather than merely moral ones. This insistence on universality is probably the key to the naming and definition problem.
Last month, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote an essay about "le wokisme" in French culture in The Atlantic. I think this French name has a nice ironic ring to it that addresses this resistance to naming. My preference would be to retain "le wokisme" as a standard.
“Woke” is simply an improvement of the Red Queen’s dictum: “Jam to-morrow, no jam yesterday—and never, ever jam to-day”
It's too bad we don't have consensus name and a canon for the ideology that "woke", "the successor ideology", etc. are trying to describe. Or, even better, if the people associated with these ideas identified with the name self-consciously. One of the virtues of Communism *as an ideology* is that it has an agreed-upon name and is founded on Marx's writings, which are extensive, coherent and brilliant, even where they have proven disastrous in practice.
The people who believe in this ideology really seem to see it as consisting in a series of moral imperatives, and by not naming it, or thinking of it as a proper ideology, they can simply presume its universality without having to examine the actual scope of these imperatives. If the ideology were a named phenomenon identified with some canonical texts, it would have to be defended intellectually in philosophical terms, rather than merely moral ones. This insistence on universality is probably the key to the naming and definition problem.
Last month, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote an essay about "le wokisme" in French culture in The Atlantic. I think this French name has a nice ironic ring to it that addresses this resistance to naming. My preference would be to retain "le wokisme" as a standard.