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Woke-ism can easily be considered the most buzzing word in sociopolitical circles for more than a decade now. What does the term actually mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke-ism as ” being well informed and up to date”; ” sensitive to any kind of injustice or discrimination.”
To understand the short-term impact and long-term consequences of woke-ism in America and worldwide, we need to go through not only the literal definition but also the manifest and latent functions of this ideology.
For example, let us consider the Black Lives Matter movement. The manifest function of the movement was to create awareness against institutionalized racial discrimination in America. But the latent unintended consequence was chaos and disorder in society, hatred towards the white majority, rioting and political upheaval. This, in turn, created further splits in American Society.
Aggressive woke movements seem to curb social injustices and are successful to a small extent, but in terms of real long-term effects, they disrupt the natural movement of society at large towards progressive values, by making people wary of anarchy and chaos.
Cancel Culture
“Cancel culture” encouraged by woke-ism ostracizes the progressive lot among the sociology-culturally right upon the slightest of disagreements, who are otherwise open to innovative ideas and experiments. No social injustice in the world can be cured by ostracizing the very parts of society, howsoever different. The unintended consequence is further division in society based on levels of sensitivity towards a particular incident or a phenomenon. More hyper-sensitive a person ‘cancelling’ a less sensitive individual is the norm. The attempt to make it ‘one size fits all’ has never worked in a progressive liberal society,a true one.
It threatens the very idea of individualism on which the Great American society has flourished.
Cancel culture is anti-dote to discussions and debates and it encourages “ethnocentrism” in which the wokes consider themselves superior to people of any other ideology. It will have deleterious effects on the growth of any organization by promoting group bias in decision-making, promotion and openness to others’ ideas.
Woke-ism is out to challenge all the established values of human civilization earned through growth over hundreds of years of human civilization. Extreme wokes do not believe in logic, science, or rationality, as they discard them as creations of oppressive structures. What they forget in the process is that the tools they use to propagate woke ideas are all outcomes of empowerment and development by the very same oppressive structures which they are out to dismantle.
Far distant India too has imported woke-ism to a small extent which manifests malevolently. Extreme wokes do not hesitate to discard a global virtue like “merit” as a Brahmanical concept. The dislike for conservatism in Indian wokes borders hate towards many upper castes, especially Brahmins.
The disregard towards merit exposes the self-contradictory nature of the woke movement. Upward mobility to the top hierarchy in any society can be achieved only through 2 processes. The first one is merit, which is the hallmark of an open society with equal opportunities. The second process is through accumulated social-cultural capital, which is prevalent in closed societies. By cancelling “merit” as the creation of oppressive structures, they are leaving the scope for upward mobility only for those with accumulated cultural capital, which they claim to be the product of the same oppressive structures. This goes against the principles of social justice and contradicts their own position.
How woke-ism will affect the Scientific Temper of USA?
Woke-ism gives more preference to value judgements than objective parameters. Disregarding religion and societal ethics will lead to a reduction in normative standards of life. Normative standards guide us to objective thinking because of our awareness of certain rules and regulations which have been established after centuries of learning and unlearning by mankind. It happens automatically through the “nurture” process.
Religions and nations set those norms. Cancelling all norms will lead to obfuscated and subjective thinking which does not augur well for the scientific temper of a country. At the time when the USA is at loggerheads with rival China, and assertive Russia, it clearly spells disaster for the greatness of America. Cause-effect relationship with respect to an increase in woke-ism and a decline in objective attitude can not be established, but the future may show symptoms of high correlation.
Woke-ism-induced decline in scientific temper will have another unintended dysfunctional consequence.
The USA and the world is overcoming discrimination based on race and caste because of scientific research which dismissed theories of race. The scientific temper of a country goes long way in eradicating such social injustices.
Will the increase in woke-ism bring us to ground zero once again where communities will judge each other based on values, valences and stereotypes, and not based on objective reasoning?
Only time will answer that, but it is highly probable.
Why Woke-ism is Here to Stay?
Woke-ism survives and thrives on the “victimhood narrative” which is the easiest to sell in a world of inequalities. It promises a utopian world with blurred differences, even biological ones.
In the process, it creates several layers of socio-cultural categories. The greater the number of categories, the greater the prospects of people with an identity crisis to bracket themselves into small identity groups.
Cancel culture, imbibed into woke-ism gives moral justification to pernicious bias towards certain races and castes, such as the white majority in America, or the Brahmins in India.
The entry barrier to becoming woke in pursuit of upward mobility is far lower than that of merit-based achievements. Low entry barriers pull more crowds, resulting in greater competition, which finally leads to more drift of individuals towards the vicious extreme of wokeness to stand out of the crowd, sometimes bordering on perversion and malice.
